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THE NEW EVANGELISM 



THE 



NEW EVANGELISM 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 



B 



HENRY DRUMMOND 

AUTHOR OF " NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD : 
ETC. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1899 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

Offke ©f the 

NC wg 

Register of Copyrfgliti, 

■175 



Copyright, 1899, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 



All rights reserved. 



S£COND COPV, 



©tottasttg Pregg : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 






^ 



NOTE 

With the exception of the articles on " The Contri- 
bution of Science to Christianity/ ' and " Spiritual Diag- 
nosis" which appeared in The Expository none of the 
following papers were intended for publication, nor were 
they revised by the Author. In a few cases portions 
of the manuscript are missing ; and such omissions are 
shown by asterisks. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

The New Evangelism, and its Relation to 

Cardinal Doctrines 3 

The Method of the New Theology, and some 

of its Applications 63 

Survival of the Fittest 87 

The Third Kingdom 119 

The Problem of Foreign Missions 161 

The Contribution of Science to Christianity . 205 

Spiritual Diagnosis • . . 257 



The New Evangelism 
and its Relation to 
Cardinal Doctrines 



Paper read to Free Church Theological 
Society, Glasgow 



The New Evangelism: and its 
Relation to Cardinal Doctrines 

IT is no small heroism in these times to 
deal with anything new. But this is a 
theological society; and I do not need to 
ask the protection of that name while I move 
for a little among lines of thought which 
may seem to verge on danger. One does 
not need to apologise for any inquiry made 
in a formative school of theology such as 
this ; for in this atmosphere a seeker after 
truth is compelled to take up another than 
that provincial standpoint which elsewhere 
he is committed to. 

The question you will naturally ask at the 
outset is, What is the new Evangelism? 
Now that is a question that I cannot an- 
swer. I do not know what the new Evan- 
gelism is, and it is because I do not know 
that I write this paper. I write because I 



4 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

ought to know, and am trying to know. 
Many here, and all the most earnest minds 
of our Church, are anxiously asking this 
question, and each who has once asked it 
feels it to be one of the chief objects of his 
life to answer it. 

Preachers, finding that the things which 
stirred men's minds two centuries ago fail to 
do so now, are compelled to ask themselves 
what this means. Do we need a new Evan- 
gelism, and if so, what ? By the word Evan- 
gelism I do not mean to include merely, or 
even particularly, evangelistic work, evangel- 
istic meetings, or what is comprehended 
under the general head of revivalism. I 
mean the methods of presenting Christian 
truth to men's minds in any form. By the 
new Evangelism, so far as mere definition is 
concerned, is meant the particular substance 
and form of evangel which is adapted to the 
present state of men's minds. The new 
Evangelism, in a word, is the Gospel for the 
Age. To notice the outcry against the 
mere mention of a Gospel for the Age is 
unnecessary here. What do we want with 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 5 

a new Gospel ? Can the Gospel ever be old ? 
might be asked elsewhere, for this is always 
cast in one's teeth when he raises those ques- 
tions, as if by speaking of a new Evangelism 
he was depreciating the old Gospel. Of 
course we do not want a new evangel, we 
state that out at once ; but an Evangelism is 
a different thing, and we do want that ; we 
want that at the present hour, almost above 
any reform of our time. 

I. The need of a new Evangelism. 

There are two general considerations 
which seem to me to prove the need of a 
new Evangelism. 

The first is the threatened decline of vital 
religion under present methods of preaching. 
If the Gospel be the power of God unto sal- 
vation, we are entitled to believe that wher- 
ever it is presented to men's minds it will 
influence and impress them. If men are 
not influenced or impressed under preaching, 
the only alternatives are, either that the 
Gospel in substance is not the power of God 
unto salvation, or that the Gospel in form is 
not presented to them so as to reach them. 



6 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

Either the Gospel cannot save them, or the 
Gospel does not reach them. We, as Chris- 
tians, are shut up to the latter. The Gospel 
is not reaching men. There are hundreds 
of churches where the Gospel is not reaching 
men. Every third minister one meets con- 
fesses that. The Church, as a whole, admits, 
for instance, that she is rapidly losing hold 
of young men as a class. What does that 
mean ? It really means that the Gospel, as 
presented to them, has ceased to be a gospel ; 
it is neither good nor new. It means that 
the active thinkers of a congregation, the 
most hopeful and eager, are failing to find 
anything there to meet their case. It is not 
simply that many of them object to religion 
naturally, which will always be the case, but 
that those who are looking for a religion do 
not find it. Many of ourselves know this by 
our own experience. How long did we not 
search ; on what diverse ministries did we 
not wait; to what endless volumes did we 
not turn; before finding a message which 
our faith could grasp or conscience rest on, 
and at the same time our intelligence re- 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 7 

spect? "I like Christianity/' said Hallam, 
the subject of Tennyson's " In Memoriam," 
"because it fits into all the folds of one's 
nature." How long was it before we found 
a form of Christianity which fitted into any 
of the folds of our nature ? From the time 
they were Sabbath-school scholars onwards, 
it is the experience of thousands of young 
men that they find only misfit after misfit in 
the theological clothes in which they were 
asked to disguise themselves. If this has 
been the experience of men who were not 
simply passive (men who were not simply 
waiting until religion would, some day or 
somehow, seize hold of them), but who were 
searching for religion, what substance is 
there in the present form of it to captivate 
the ordinary run of men ? Our present 
Evangelism, as mere matter of fact, is not 
meeting the wants of the age. 

In 1847 D r - Chalmers found — and the 
statistics almost paralysed him *+- that there 
were 30,000 people in Glasgow who did not 
go to church. Since then the Free Church 
has risen; Baptists, Independents, Morisoni- 



8 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

ans, and Wesleyans, have poured their new 
life into the city. The most complete evan- 
gelistic organisation in the kingdom, the 
Christian Union, has been at work. Have 
Chalmers' 30,000 been sensibly reduced? 
They have been increased exactly fivefold 
— out of all proportion to the increase of 
the population. Excluding 100,000 Roman 
Catholics, there are at present 150,000 non- 
church-goers in the city. The aspect of 
affairs in the English towns is notoriously 
worse. To take a single case. The popu- 
lation of Sheffield is 240,000. It has 60 
churches. Allowing 1,000 sitters to each 
church there would only be accommodation 
to 60,000 people; not only, therefore, do 
180,000 not go to church, but there is no 
accommodation for them if they were willing. 
What is the cause of this decline in vital 
religion ? Why is the Gospel not reaching 
the Age ? Because it is not the Gospel for 
the Age. It is the Gospel for a former Age. 
Because, in the form of it as used, the Gospel 
is neither good nor new. It does not fit into 
all the folds of men's being. It is not in 
itself bad — but it is a bad fit. 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 9 

The second general consideration is based, 
not on the effects of Evangelism, but on its 
nature. The very nature of truth demands 
from time to time a new Evangelism. At 
the opening of this college, we heard (Prof. 
Bruce's introductory lecture) that a Scotch 
divine at the Presbyterian Council in Phila- 
delphia found himself rebuked for using the 
phrase, " Progress in Theology." Theology, 
he was eloquently reminded, was behind us. 
He was pointed to the Standards of his 
Church. There is no more unfortunate word 
in our Church's vocabulary than " Standard." 
A standard is a thing that stands. Theology 
is a thing that moves. There must be prog- 
ress in everything, and more in theology 
than in anything, for the content of theol- 
ogy is larger and more expansive than the 
content of anything else. I do not say we are 
to give up the idea involved in the word 
Standard. We certainly never can. But 
standards must move. The sole condition 
of having them with us at any particular 
place or time is that they should move with 
us according to place or time. The word 



io THE NEW EVANGELISM 

Standard, as applied to theology, is in some 
respects an unfortunate term. Buffon's Nat- 
ural History was a standard. Linnaeus' Vege- 
table System was a standard. But they are 
not standards now. They were places for 
the mind of Science to rest on in its onward 
sweep through the centuries ; but the perches 
are not needed there now, and they are 
vacant. These books stand like deserted 
inns on the roadside which gave hearty meals 
and shelter in their day, but which the race 
(with no disrespect to Linnaeus and Buffon) 
has long since passed. When the English 
fought Waterloo, they did not leave their 
standard at Bannockburn — they brought it 
up to Quatre Bras ; and if our standard was 
made for Holland, or Rome, or Geneva, we 
must bring it up to Germany, and Paris, and 
the Highlands. But there is something 
deeper than progress in theology; there is 
progress in truth itself. " Truth is the 
daughter of Time." It is surely unnecessary 
to insist on this, for it is true of all kinds of 
truth, in the natural as well as the spiritual 
sphere. Nature is all before our eyes, as 



THE NEW EVANGELISM ir 

truth in the Bible is all before our eyes. 
But we do not see it all ; every day we are 
seeing more. The firmament was not all 
mapped by astronomers at once. Since 
Calvin's time many a new star has been dis- 
covered. The stars were there before. Space 
was there before, but a new order is seen in 
it, new material for thought, new systems, 
especially a new perspective. To take an- 
other illustration : when we were children we 
could not understand how, if God made the 
world, He had made it so ugly ; why every- 
thing in nature was brown, or dun, or green, 
and grey. Why was the sky not scarlet like 
the inside of our trumpet, or a good hearty 
blue, with unicorns on it like our drum ? 
We thought, as we looked at the lichens and 
washed-out azure, that, by some oversight, 
God had forgotten to put the colour in. We 
know now why God did not put the colour 
in. We know that Nature wears the colour 
of the future. It is painted for the highest 
art. Vermilion is for the savage, blue with 
unicorns for the child, the neutral tints for the 
world's maturity — the developed taste. The 



12 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

colour was in Nature all along, but the 
world's eye was not full grown. The Greeks 
had almost no colour-sense at all ; and if Mr. 
Ruskin sees what Homer did not see, it is 
not because it was not to be seen, but that 
the faculty was not developed. 

The higher art has grown ; it sees in the 
colouring of Nature a beauty which must 
increase till the evolution of mind and eye 
pronounces and sees all perfect. It is so 
with Truth ; the truth-sense, like the colour- 
sense, grows. Truth has her vermilion, 
and her high art olives and sage-greens. 
" When Solon was asked," says Plutarch, 
" if he had given the Athenians the best 
possible laws, he answered that they were 
as good as the people could then receive. ,, 
When we were given our system of truth, it 
was as good as the people could receive — 
perhaps as good as their teachers could give. 
But we can receive more now; our taste 
demands sage-green, and we cannot live on 
vermilion. If it be objected that this ar- 
gument renders the Bible itself effete, the 
answer is that the Bible is not a system. It 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 13 

is the firmament ; its truth is without form, 
therefore without limit. It is a book of 
such boundless elasticity that the furthest 
growth of the truth-sense can never find its 
response outgrown. And it is in this elas- 
ticity that one finds a sanction for a new 
theology to be the basis of a new Evangel- 
ism. It encourages a new theology; the 
prospect and possibility of that is written in 
every epigram and paradox, in the absence 
of anything propositional or bound. The 
view we are to take, therefore, of the old 
theologies is not that they are false, but 
simply that they are old. Those who framed 
them did in their time just what we want 
to do in ours. The Reformation did not 
profess to create new truth; it was not a 
re-formation, but simply a restoration — a 
restoration of the first theology of the New 
Testament, as much of it as could then be 
seen. At the time, probably, it was a restor- 
ation, and had all the strength and grandeur 
of the first theology, with all its vividness 
and life. Probably it was suited to the 
wants of the time, and moved the hearts of 
preacher and people. 



14 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

We, too, can still preach it, but to some 
of us it has a hollow sound. If we would 
confess the honest truth, our words for it are 
rather those of respect than enthusiasm ; we 
read it, hear it, study it, and preach it, but 
cannot honestly say that it kindles or moves 
us. When we wish to be kindled or moved, 
driven perhaps to prove whether we are 
capable of being kindled or moved, we leave 
the restoration and go back to that which 
was restored. 

Restoration can only retain its hold vitally 
and powerfully for a limited time. It is essen- 
tially an accommodation for a certain age. 
If that age has changed, it no longer accom- 
modates me, it incommodes me. What was 
the new theology of the seventeenth century 
is the theology of the nineteenth century 
only on one condition — that the age has not 
grown. If it has, in the nature of things it 
no longer accommodates me. It is not bad, 
simply a bad fit. The then new theology, 
the very adaptation possibly that was needed, 
becomes now old doctrine, a mere old skull, 
an old skull with the juices dry. This is the 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 15 

source of what is called dry preaching. It is 
a once glorious truth disenchanted by time 
into a faded, juiceless form. 

Such then is the general effect of Time on 
Truth. As the serpent periodically casts its 
skin, so Truth. The number of times it has 
cast its skin marks the number of stages in 
its forward growth. Many of the shelves of 
our theological libraries are simply museums 
of the cast skin of Truth. The living organ- 
ism has glided out of them to seek a roomier 
vestment. This is no disrespect, I repeat 
again, to the old theology. For the present 
vestiture in turn must take its place on the 
shelf. Nor does it imply that no beauty 
exists there, nor that to many some of the 
old doctrines may not prove even to-day a 
fountain of life. They do do so. Many 
volumes of theology have never been out- 
grown ; many of the Puritans, for instance, 
have not only never been outgrown, but it is 
difficult to conceive how they can be. To 
take again the analogy from colour. The 
sage-green does not necessarily destroy the 
vermilion, though it renders many of its 



16 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

combinations old-fashioned. Some forms of 
truth in like manner may have reached their 
ultimate expression, certainly they may, 
though this is not so clear as that some have 
not. To sum up, the demand for a new 
theology, therefore, as the basis of a new 
Evangelism is founded upon the nature of 
Truth. It is not caprice, nor love of what is 
new. It is the necessity for what is new. 
It is in the nature of things. 

I have next to bring some more specific 
charges against the old theology — the old 
theology, that is to say, as represented in the 
ordinary preaching of the day. And lest I 
should be accused of caricaturing the doc- 
trines in question, let me say that the render- 
ing which follows represents the impression 
made as matter of fact by these doctrines 
upon myself. I do not implicate the whole 
Evangelism, nor do I speak directly for any 
one else ; but I cannot more honestly illus- 
trate the teaching of what was to me the 
current Evangelism — the pabulum, namely, 
supplied by the ordinary country pulpit, by 
the evangelist's address, by the Sabbath- 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 17 

school teacher, and in a limited sense by re- 
ligous books and tracts — than by stating the 
sort of religious ideas which these fostered 
in myself. For convenience I select three 
as samples, taking them in theological order. 
I limit myself likewise to a very few sentences 
with regard to each, more particularly (1) as 
to the theological conception and (2) as to 
the ethical effect. 

(1) The conception of God as fostered by 
the old Evangelism. 

The chief characteristic of the conception 
of God to me was its want of characteristic. 
The figure was too vague for any practical 
purpose. It was not a character. One 
could form no intelligent figure of God, for 
so far as it could be formed it was the God 
of the Old Testament. The Incarnation, 
i. e., contributed nothing. The Old Testa- 
ment believer, I need not remind you, was 
very helpless as to a personal God. Each 
man, practically, had to make an image of 
God for himself. He was given a name, and 
a set of qualities — Holiness, Justice, Wis- 
dom, and others, and out of this he had to 



i8 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

make God. The consequence was that the 
great majority made it wrong, and wor- 
shipped they knew not what. One great 
purpose of the Incarnation was to change all 
this. It is to give us a new, defined, intelli- 
gible Figure of God. " The Son of God is 
come," said John, who saw most fully the 
meaning of the Word made Flesh — "The 
Son of God is come, and hath given us an 
understanding that we may know HimP 

The old Evangelism had little benefit here 
from the incarnation in this respect. It 
never got this understanding. God remained 
unchristianised in it. The Figure came no 
nearer. God remained Jehovah, the I AM 
that I AM. He was not God in Christ, 
God made intelligible by Christ, God made 
lovable by Christ, but God Eternal, Un- 
changeable, Invisible, therefore Unknowable; 
and in the nature of this cloud-God, the out- 
standing element was Vengeance — Anger, 
the ethical effect of which is obvious. A 
mans whole religion depends on his concep- 
tion of God, so much so that to give a man 
religion in many cases is simply to correct 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 19 

his conception of God. But if man's natural 
conception of God, which is of a Being or of 
a Force opposed to him, a Being to be 
appeased, not corrected, his religion will be 
be a religion of Fear. God therefore was a 
God to be feared, an uncomfortable presence 
about ones life. He was always in court, 
either actually sitting in judgment or collect- 
ing material for the next case. He was the 
haunting presence of a great Recorder, 

" Who was writing now the story 
Of what little children do." 

The reiteration that God was Love did 
nothing to dispel this terrible illusion. We 
cannot love God because we are told, for 
Love is not made to order. We can believe 
God's love, but believing love is like looking 
at heat. We cannot respond to it. To ex- 
cite love, we need a person, not a doctrine — 
a Father, not a deity. To be changed into 
the same image we must look at the glory 
of God, not in se, but in the face of Jesus. 
The old Evangelism was defective in not 
exhibiting God in the face of Jesus. It ex- 



20 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

hibited God in the nailed hands of Jesus; 
this is an aspect of God, an essential aspect, 
but not God. Next — 

(2) The conception of Christ. 

If the conception of God was vague, the 
conception of Christ was worse. He was a 
theological person. His function was to ad- 
just matters between the hostile kingdoms 
of heaven and earth. 

I do not acquit myself of blame here, and 
I hope no one else has an experience so 
shocking, but until well on in my college 
course, and after hearing hundreds of ser- 
mons and addresses on the Person and Work 
of Christ, the ruling idea left in my mind 
was that Christ was a mere convenience. 
He was the second person in the Trinity, 
existing for the sake of some logical or theo- 
logical necessity, a doctrinal convenience. 
He was the creation of theology, and His 
function was purely utilitarian. This might 
have been theological, but it was not reli- 
gious. Religion said, " Christ our L ife? 
Theology said, " Christ our Logic? 

This is a painful confession, but it is far 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 21 

more painful to think of its basis. It is im- 
possible to believe that in these sermons I 
was not presented with the true aspects of 
Christ's life and character. But it is also 
almost impossible to believe that these were 
insisted on with anything like the same fre- 
quency or reality as the aspect I have named. 
What moves an attentive mind in a sermon 
is its residual truth, not the complementary 
passages, not the squarings with other doc- 
trines, but that truth on which the whole 
theme is strung, the vertebral column which, 
though hid, is the true pillar of the rest. 
Now the residuum to me — and it is sur- 
prising how unerringly this betrays itself 
and stands nakedly out from all mere words 
— was always this. Whatever other points 
were thrown in, whatever devout expressions 
were mixed with it, whatever appeals to the 
affections, this was the prominent half- 
truth, and therefore whole error. 

This is the explanation, I think, of the 
fact, now pretty well acknowledged, that the 
old theology made almost nothing of the hu- 
manity of Christ. In such a body of divinity 



22 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

clearly there was little room for so mundane 
a thing as humanity. The arrangements in 
which Christ played a part were looked at 
almost exclusively from the Divine and cos- 
mical standpoint. The question was, how 
God could forgive sin, and yet justify the 
sinner; how God could do this and that, as 
if we had anything to do with it. Such a 
divinity necessarily wanted humanity, the 
humanity of man as well as the humanity of 
Christ. Man was a cypher, the mere theo- 
logical unit, the x of doctrine (his character, 
his aims, his achievements, his influence, were 
neither here nor there) and an unknown 
quantity, one of the parties in the proposi- 
tion. And it was not necessary for this 
theological unit to have a humanitarian 
Christ, except as to the mere identity of 
flesh, and this was requisite only to complete 
the theological proposition. 

The emphasis on the humanity of Christ, 
which, happily, has now crept into our best 
teaching, marks more distinctly perhaps 
than anything else the dawn of the new 
Evangelism. Still, it must be confessed that 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 23 

in influential quarters the revival of this doc- 
trine is viewed even yet with no inconsider- 
able alarm. The newer Lives of Christ, for 
instance, in which the humanity is conspicu- 
ously developed, are constantly assailed as 
Unitarian, and within the last fortnight a 
Life of Christ has been given to the world, 
from the preface to which one can almost 
gather that the author's object is to provide 
an antidote to the erroneous tendencies of 
these works. 

Men fail to see that it was God Himself 
who conceived this wonderful idea of a 
humanitarian Christ When God does any- 
thing, He never does it by halves. When 
He made the word flesh, when He made 
Jesus a Man, He made a Man, and it is just 
because He carried out His idea so perfectly 
that Unitarianism is possible. When we say 
Man, then let us mean Man. It is a mis- 
taken scruple even to minimise His Human- 
ity. In our zeal for the doctrines of the 
Atonement we are really robbing God of 
His doctrine of the Incarnation. 

(3) A third point to notice is, The old 



24 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

Evangelism in its conception of Salvation, 
and of religion generally. The characteristic 
to notice here is that religion was not so 
much a question of character as of status. 
Man's standing in the sight of God was the 
great thing. Was he sheltered judicially 
behind Christ, or was he standing on his 
own merits ? This is a vital question to ask, 
certainly, but the way in which legal status 
was put sanctioned the most erroneous 
notions as to religion and life. Salvation 
was a thing that came into force at death. 
It was not a thing for life. Good works, of 
course, were permitted, and even demanded, 
but they were never very clearly reconcilable 
with grace. The prime end of religion was 
to get off ; the plan of salvation was an elab- 
orate scheme for getting off; and after a 
man had faced that scheme, understood it, 
acquiesced in it, the one thing needful was 
secured. Life after that was simply a wait- 
ing until the plan should be executed by his 
death. What use life was, this one thing 
being adjusted, it were hard to say. It was 
not in the religious sphere at all. The 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 25 

world was to pass away, and the lust thereof, 
and all time given to it, all effort spent on it, 
was so much loss, like putting embroidery 
upon a shroud. 

When a preacher did speak of character, 
of the imitation of Christ, of self-denial, of 
righteousness, of truth and humility, the 
references theologically were not only not 
clear, but were generally introduced with an 
apology for enforcing them at all. Nine 
times out of ten, too, the preacher took them 
all back under the last head, where he spoke 
of man's inability and the necessity of the 
Holy Spirit. The ethical effect of even 
weakening the absolute connection between 
religion and morality is too obvious to be 
referred to, so I shall pass on. 

Having now given samples of the teaching 
of the old Evangelism, I need not take up 
the time to complete its circle of theology, 
for the doctrines indicated rule and colour 
all the rest. No doubt what has been said 
up till now is more or less commonplace to 
most of you, and (with regard to the more) 
I now proceed to attempt something more 



26 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

constructive, for which, however, alt that has 
gone before has been a somewhat necessary 
preparation. In what follows I can only- 
hope to indicate what dimly seem to me to 
be the lines upon which a new, intelligent, 
and living Evangelism must be built up. 

II. What I am most anxious to do here 
is to arrive at principles. I make no attempt 
to sketch portions of a detailed theology, 
such as one might wish to see taking the 
place of some of the old doctrines. That 
will all come in time; i.e., if it ought to 
come. It is the principles which are to 
euide us in constructing the new Evangel- 
ism that are the true difficulty. We have 
all our own opinion as to special points of 
contrast, and, as we think, of improvement ; 
but what outstanding general truths are to 
reo-ulate the movement as a whole ? I fear 
I shall only have time to refer to two. 

(i) Perhaps the most important principle, 
in the first place, is that the new Evangelism 
must not be doctrinal. By this is not meant 
that it is to be independent of doctrine, but 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 27 

simply that its truths as conveyed to the 
people are not to be in the propositional 
form. With regard to doctrine, to avoid 
misconception, let me say at once we must 
recognise it as one of the three absolutely 
essential possessions of a Christian Church. 

The three outstanding departments of the 
Church's work are criticism, dogmatism, and 
Evangelism. Without the first there is no 
guarantee of truth, without the second there 
is no defence of truth, and without the third 
there is no propagation of truth. Criticism 
then, in a word, secures truth, dogmatism 
conserves it, and evangelism spreads it. 
Now, when it is said that preaching is not 
to be doctrinal, what is meant is this. 
When Evangelism wishes to receive truth, 
so as to expound it, it is to refer to criticism 
for information rather than to dogmatism. 
And when it gives out what it has received, 
it is neither to be critical in form, nor 
doctrinal. 

To deal with this in detail. When Evan- 
gelism wishes to receive truth in order to 
expound it, it is to refer to criticism for that 



28 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

truth rather than to dogmatism. This sim- 
ply means that a man is to go to a reliable 
edition of the Bible for his truth, and not 
to theology. 

Why should he take this trouble ? Does 
not theology give him Bible truth in accu- 
rate, convenient, and, moreover, in logical 
propositions ? There it lies ready made to 
his hand, all cut and dry ; why should he 
not use it ? Just because it is all cut and 
dry. Just because it lies there ready made 
in accurate, convenient, and logical proposi- 
tions. You cannot cut and dry truth. You 
cannot accept truth ready made without its 
ceasing to live as truth. And that is one 
of the reasons why the current Evangelism 
is dead. 

There is in reality no worse enemy under 
certain circumstances to a true Evangelism 
than a propositional theology, with the latter 
controlling the former by the authority of 
the Church. For one does not then receive 
the truth for himself; he accepts it bodily. 
He begins, set up by his Church with a 
stock in trade which has cost him nothing, 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 29 

and which, though it may serve him all his 
life, is just as much worth exactly as his 
belief in his Church. One effect of this is 
to relieve him of all personal responsibility. 
This possession of truth, moreover, thus 
lightly won, is given to him as infallible- 
There is nothing to add to it. It is a sys- 
tem. And to start a man in life with such 
a principle is a degradation. All through 
life, instead of working towards truth, he is 
working from it, or what he is told is it. 

An infallible standard is a temptation 
to a mechanical faith. Infallibility always 
paralyses. It gives rest, but it is the rest 
of stagnation. Men make one great act of 
faith at the beginning of their lives — then 
have done with it for ever. All moral, in- 
tellectual, and spiritual effort is over; and 
a cheap theology ends in a cheap life. It is 
the same thing that makes men take refuge 
in the Church of Rome and in a set of 
dogmas. Infallibility meets the deepest 
desire of man, but meets it in the most 
fatal form. All desire is given to stimulate 
to action ; much more this, the deepest, — 



3 o THE NEW EVANGELISM 

the hunger after truth. Men deal with this 
desire in two ways. First, by Unbelief, — 
that crushes it by blind force ; second, by 
Infallibility — that lulls it to sleep by blind 
faith. The effect of a doctrinal theology 
is the effect of infallibility. The wholesale 
belief in a system, however grand it may be, 
grant even that it were infallible — the 
wholesale belief in this system as the start- 
ing point for a working Evangelism is not 
Faith, though it always gets that name. It 
is mere credulity. There is a vital differ- 
ence between Faith and credulity. Realise 
what it fully amounts to, and you will see 
how much, besides this, there is in the reli- 
gion of this country which falls before the 
distinction. There is no real religious value 
in this belief; for it is more belief in a 
Church than in truth. It is a comfortable, 
credulous rest upon authority, not a hard- 
earned, self-obtained personal possession. 
Truth never becomes truth until it is earned. 
The moral responsibility here, besides, is 
nothing. The Westminster Divines are 
responsible, not I. And anything which 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 31 

destroys responsibility, or transfers it, can- 
not but be injurious in its moral tendency, 
and useless in itself. 

It may be objected, perhaps, that this 
statement of the paralysis, spiritual and 
mental, induced by infallibility applies also 
to the Bible. The answer is that though 
the Bible is infallible, the infallibility is not 
in such a form as to become a temptation. 
And that leads to a remark as to the contrast 
between the form of truth in the Bible and 
the form in theology. In theology, as we 
have seen, truth is propositional, tied up in 
neat parcels, systematised and arranged in 
logical order. In the Bible, truth is a foun- 
tain. There is an atmosphere here, an 
expansiveness, an infinity. Theology is 
essentially finite, and it only contains as 
much infinite truth as can be chained down 
by its finite words. The very point of it is. 
that it is defined, otherwise it is no use. 

To the practical question. There are few 
minds which can really take truth in this 
theological form. Truth is a thing to be 
slowly absorbed, not to be bolted whole. In 



32 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

this country we have been so accustomed to 
get and give our truth in the prepositional 
form, that many congregations do not recog- 
nise it if stated in the ordinary language of 
life. But this is the only living language. 
And the failure to catch sight of the truth 
when clothed in this language means that it 
has not been comprehended before as a sub- 
stance, but as a form. 

"Two or three days ago, I dined," says 
Lynch in " Letters to the Scattered," " with 
a little child whose mamma had prepared for 
him a very wholesome and delightful pudding. 
1 What is in it ? ' said the child. ' There 's 
an egg in it,' said the mother. 'Where's the 
egg ? ' asked the child, after close and incred- 
ulous inspection. ' It is mixed with it,' she 
explained. 

" There are many grown men and women," 
adds Lynch, " that unless they see the very 
form of a doctrine will not believe they 
can have the nutriment of it. They ask, 
' Where 's the egg ? ' and if you say it is 
mixed with it — the doctrine of Atonement, 
or of Justification, or Sanctification — and 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 33 

was diffused through the whole of what was 
said, they shake their heads suspiciously. 
They will have nothing to do with such 
preaching, or such books, or such people." 

There is nothing truer, certainly, than that 
in this country people at once suspect adul- 
teration if you do not present them with the 
actual egg, shell and all. But what I am try- 
ing to show is that this demand is a mistake, 
and defeats its own end. The truth is Na- 
ture never provides for man's wants in any 
direction, bodily, mental, or spiritual, in such 
a form as that he can simply accept her gifts 
automatically. She puts all the mechanical 
powers at his disposal, but he must make his 
lever. She gives him corn, but he must 
grind it. She prepares coal, but he must dig 
it; and even when she grows him apples and 
plums, ready-made fruits, he has at least to 
digest them, and in most cases he had better 
cook them. A law of nature like this, we 
are justified in carrying by analogy into the 
region of the spiritual. A man can no more 
assimilate truth in infallible lumps than he 
can corn. Though it be perfect, infallible, 

3 



34 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

yet he has to do everything to it before he 
can use it. Corn is perfect, all the products 
of Nature are perfect, and perfection in Na- 
ture corresponds to infallibility in truth. But 
perfect though they are, few of the products 
of Nature are available as they stand. So 
with Truth. Man must separate, think, pre- 
pare, dissolve, digest, work, and most of these 
he must do for himself and within himself. 
If it be replied that this is exactly what the- 
ology does, I answer, it is exactly what it 
does not. It simply does what the green- 
grocer does when he arranges his apples and 
plums in the shop-windows. He may tell 
me a Magnum Bonum from a Victoria, or a 
Baldwin from a Newtown Pippin ; but he 
does not help me to eat it. His information 
is useful, and for scientific horticulture ab- 
solutely essential. Should a sceptical po- 
mologist deny that there was such a thing 
as a Baldwin or mistake it for a Newtown 
Pippin, we should be glad to refer the 
said pomologist to him. But if we were 
hungry, and an orchard were handy, we 
should not trouble him. This brings us 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 35 

back to the original proposition then, that 
the new Evangelism as a provision for the 
hunger of men's souls is not to be doctrinal. 
Their truth is to be given them, not in infal- 
lible lumps, but as a diffused nutriment. 
Truth is an orchard rather than a museum. 
Dogmatism will be very useful to us when 
scientific necessity makes us go to the mu- 
seum. Criticism will be very useful in seeing 
that only fruit-bearers grow in the orchard and 
neither weeds nor poisonous sports. But 
truth in infallible propositional lumps is not 
natural, proper, assimilable food for the soul 
of man ; and therefore a propositional theol- 
ogy is not the subject-matter of Evangelism. 
(2) So much for exposition of the nature 
of the truth with which Evangelism is con- 
cerned. The second principle to which we 
now turn refers to a matter of equal mo- 
ment- — the faculty which deals with truth. 
And I might sum up what is to be said 
under this head in this proposition — The 
leading Faculty of the new theology is not 
to be the Reason. The previous proposition 
deals with the form of truth. This is meant 



36 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

to elucidate the principle of arriving at 
truth. It is a deeper question, and strikes 
at a fundamental difference between the 
old and the new theology. 

The old theology was largely a product of 
reason. It was an elaborate, logical con- 
struction. The complaint against it is that, 
as a logical construction, it was arrived at 
by a faculty of the mind, and not by a 
faculty of the soul. On close scrutiny it 
turns out to be really nothing more nor less 
than rationalism. 

The doctrine of the Atonement, for in- 
stance, and the whole federal theology is an 
elaborate rationalism. The common way of 
presenting salvation is the most naked syllo- 
gism : " I believe. He that believeth hath 
everlasting life, therefore I have everlast- 
ing life." I do not pause to point out 
that a theology of this sort may be re- 
ceived by any one without any spiritual 
effect whatsoever being produced. It does 
not take a religious man to be a theologian ; 
it simply takes a man with fair reasoning 
powers. This man happens to apply these 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 37 

powers to doctrinal subjects, but in no 
other sense than he might apply them to 
astronomy or physics. I knew a man, the 
author of a well-known orthodox theological 
work which has passed through a dozen 
editions, and lies on the shelves of all our 
libraries. I never knew that man to go to 
church, nor to give a farthing in charity, 
though he was a rich man, nor to give any 
sensible sign whatever that he had ever 
heard of Christianity. It is equally unnec- 
essary to point out that if reason is the 
exclusive or primary faculty in theology, 
theology itself breaks down under rigid 
tests at almost every point. Its first prin- 
ciple, for example, that God is, contains a 
distinct contradiction, as has been repeatedly 
pointed out. Many philosophers, therefore, 
in being presented with theology as the 
expression of the Christian religion, have 
had no alternative but to become atheists. 
The reasoning faculty then cannot be the 
organ of the new Evangelism, for its conclu- 
sions are philosophically assailable. But I 
am not dealing here with philosophy, and it 



38 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

is not to be understood that I am using terms 
— Reason, for instance — in any particular 
philosophical sense. I am looking at the ques- 
tion exclusively from its practical side. And 
the question I ask myself is, " When I appre- 
hend spiritual truth, what faculty do I em- 
ploy ? " When I say it is not the reason, I do 
not purposely make the distinction between 
the Understanding and the Reason, which 
Kant and his followers, for example, do in 
philosophy, and Coleridge in religion, making 
the Understanding the logical faculty and 
the Reason the intuitive faculty. I use the 
word in its ordinary working sense, mean- 
ing by it, if you like, the logical understand- 
ing of the writers mind. 

What faculty do I employ, then, in ap- 
prehending spiritual truth? What is the 
primary faculty of the new Evangelism if it 
is not the Reason? Leaving philosophical 
distinctions aside again, I think it is the 
Imagination. Overlook the awkwardness of 
this mere word, and ask yourself if this is 
not the organ of your mind which gives you 
a vision of truth. The subject-matter of the 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 39 

new Evangelism must be largely the words 
of Christ, the circle of ideas of Christ in 
their harmony, and especially in their per- 
spective. Sit down for a moment and hear 
Him speak. Take almost any of His words. 
To what faculty do they appeal? Almost 
without exception to the Imagination. And 
this is the main thing I wish to say to-night. 
I do not merely refer to His parables, to His 
allusions to nature, to the miracles, to His 
endless symbolism — the comparisons be- 
tween Himself and bread, water, vine, wine, 
shepherd, doctor, light, life, and a score of 
others. But all His most important sayings 
are put up in such form as to make it per- 
fectly clear that they w r ere deliberately de- 
signed for the Imagination. 

You cannot indeed really put up religious 
truth in any other form. You can put up 
facts, information, but God's truth will not 
go into a word. You must put it in an 
image. God Himself could not put truth in 
a word, therefore He made the Word flesh. 
There are few things less comprehended 
than this relation of truth to language. 



40 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

" Was stets und aller Orten 
Sich ewig jung erweist- 
1st in gebundnen Worten 
Ein ungebundner Geist." 

The purpose of revelation is to exhibit the 
mind of God — the ungebundner Geist. The 
vehicle is words, gebundnen Worten. What 
words ? Words which are windows and not 
prisons. Words of the intellect cannot hold 
God — the finite cannot hold the infinite. 
But an image can. So God has made it 
possible for us by giving us an external world 
to make irnage-words. The external world is 
not a place to work in, or to feed in, but to 
see in. It is a world of images, the external 
everywhere revealing the eternal. The key 
to the external world is to look not at the 
things which are seen, but in looking at the 
things which are seen to see through them 
to the things that are unseen. Look at the 
ocean. It is mere water — a thing which is 
seen ; but look again, look through that 
which is seen, and you see the limitlessness 
of Eternity. Look at a river, another of 
God's images of the unseen. It is also water, 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 41 

but God has given it another form to image 
a different truth. There is Time, swift and 
silent. There is Life, irrevocable, passing. 
But the most singular truth of this, as sug- 
gested a moment ago, is the Incarnation. 
There was no word in the world's vocabulary 
for Himself. In Nature we had images of 
Time and Eternity. The seasons spoke of 
Change, the mountains of Stability. The 
home-life imaged Love. Law and Justice 
were in the civil system. The snow was 
Purity, the rain, Fertility. By using these 
metaphors we could realise feebly Time and 
Eternity, Stability and Change. But there 
was no image of Himself. So God made 
one. He gave a word in Flesh — a word in 
the Image-form. He gave the Man Christ 
Jesus the express image of His person. This 
was the one image that was wanting in the 
image-vocabulary of truth, and the Incarna- 
tion supplied it. 

God had really supplied this image before, 
but man had spoilt it, disfigured it to such 
an extent that it was unrecognisable. God 
made man in His own image ; that was a 



42 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

word made flesh. From its ruins man might 
have reconstructed an image of God, but the 
audacity of the attempt repelled him, and for 
centuries men had forgotten that the image 
of God was in themselves. 

How, then, do you characterise that irrev- 
erent elaboration of theology which attempts 
to show you in words what God has had to 
do in the slow unfolding of Himself in his- 
tory, and by that final resort, when words 
were useless, of incarnating the Word, giving 
us the manifestation of a living God in a liv- 
ing Word. These doctrines stand apart. 
They are above words. It is a mockery for 
the Reason to define and formulate here, as 
if by heaping up words she could drive the 
truth into a corner and dispense it in phrases 
as required. It is just as clear, as a simple 
question of rhetoric, that Christ's words were 
positively protected against the mere touch 
of reason. They were put up in such form 
in many cases as to challenge reason to make 
beginning, middle, or end of them. Try to 
reason out a parable. Try to read into it the- 
ology, as our forefathers often did ; or dispen- 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 43 

sational truth, as certain erratic theologians 
do to-day, and it becomes either utterly con- 
temptible or utterly unintelligible. 

You see a parable, you discern it ; it enters 
your mind as an image, you image it, imag- 
ine it. I am the Bread of Life. With what 
faculty do we apprehend that ? We look at 
it long and earnestly, and at first are utterly 
baffled by it. But as we look it grows more 
and more transparent, and we see through it. 
We do not understand it ; if we were asked 
what we saw, we should be surprised at the 
difficulty we had in defining it. Some image 
rose out of the word Bread, became slowly 
living, sank into our soul, and vanished. 
The peculiarity of this expression is that it 
is not a simile. " I am like bread." Christ 
does not say that. I am bread — the thing 
itself. And that faculty, standing face to 
face with truth, draws aside the veil, or 
pierces it, seizes the living substance, absorbs 
it ; and the soul is nourished. 

Besides the parable, the metaphor, and the 
metaphor which is no metaphor, Christ has 
two other favourite modes of expression. 



44 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

These are the axiom and the paradox. The 
axiom is the basis of certainty ; the reason 
is inoperative without it, but it is not appre- 
hended by reason. It is seen, not proved. 
Again, therefore, we are dealing with the 
Imagination. The paradox is the darkest of 
all figures. " He that loveth his life shall 
lose it, and he that hateth his life shall find 
it" What can reason make of that ? It is 
an utter blank; it absolutely repels reason. 
But for that very cause it is the richest mine 
for the imagination. It is not the darkest 
figure, but the lightest, because the rays 
come from exactly opposite sides, and meet 
as truth in the middle. The shell of words, 
once burst, reveals a whole world, in which 
the illuminated mind runs riot, and revels in 
the boundlessness of truth. 

Had the reason been able to sink its shaft, 
it might have brought up a nugget. Theol- 
ogy would have gained another proposition, 
another neat parcel, and there would have 
been the end of it. As it is, it is without 
end, limitless, infinite truth, incapable in that 
form of becoming uninteresting, unreal, in- 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 45 

eluded in a human phrase. It is this sense 
of depth about Christ's words which is the 
sure test of their truth. They shade off, 
every one, into the unknown, and the roots 
of the known are always in the unknown. 
Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Dogma is 
simply an attempt to undo this. It takes up 
the sublimest truth in its fingers with no 
more awe than an anatomist lifts a muscle 
with his forceps, turns it about, dissects it, 
determines the genus and species of the 
organism to which it belongs, and marks it 
down " described " for all future time. We 
know all about it — all about it. We see the 
whole thing quite clearly ; it is as simple as 
the frog's muscle. The new Evangelism can 
never deal with truth in this way. It will 
never say that it sees quite clearly. It may 
remain ignorant, but it will never presume 
to say there is no darkness, no mystery, no 
unknown. It will sound truth, it will go 
fathoms further perhaps than the reason can 
go, but it will come back saying we have 
found no bottom. It is not all as clear as 
the old theology; it has that dimness of an 



46 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

older theology which sees through a glass 
darkly, which knows in part, and which, 
because it knows in part, knows the more 
certainly that it shall know hereafter. 

The want of apprehension of the quality 
of truth by much of the propositional theol- 
ogy is in nothing better evidenced than by 
this mistake as to its quantity. It robbed it 
at once of the infinite and the supernatural. 
The soul-food was taken out of the truth, 
and the husks thrown to the intellect. As 
a faculty, then, the reason is not large enough 
to be the organ of Christianity. It has a 
very high and prominent place to play in 
Christianity, hut prima facie it lacks the first 
and the second qualities of a religious faculty. 
The first of these qualities is that just men- 
tioned, largeness and penetration. The 
second is universality. All men cannot rea- 
son, but all men can see. In the rudest savage 
and in the youngest child, the imagination is 
strong. And Christ addressed His religion 
to the most unlettered, to the youngest child. 
He boldly asserted that His religion was for 
the youngest child. He directly appealed 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 47 

again and again to the child-spirit. " Except 
ye become as a little child, ye shall in no 
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." To 
object to this that Christ was speaking to the 
Oriental mind is of course beside the mark. 
Christ was not an Oriental speaking to the 
Oriental, He was the Son of Man speaking 
to man in the universal language of truth. I 
have already apologised for using this word 
Imagination, but I think I have made clear 
the idea. I am not concerned longer, there- 
fore, about retaining it. I am not sure that 
it is the right word. You might perhaps 
prefer to call it faith or intuition, or the spirit 
of discernment, or a subjective idealism, but 
the name is of no moment. The idea I have 
tried to make clear is that this is the faculty 
which works with the eyes, as contrasted 
with reason, which works with the hands. 
The old theology manipulates truth, the new 
is to discern it. As preachers our aim must 
be, not to prove things, but to make men see 
things. 

This conclusion with regard to the faculty 
of the new Evangelism is derived simply 



48 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

from observation. It contains the crucial 
point of the whole question, and I have 
little more to say except in support of it. 
But I need scarcely remind those of you 
who are in any way conversant with Ger- 
man philosophy that distinctions closely cor- 
responding to this have been drawn in 
philosophy, and long indeed before the 
German philosophers arose. The later form 
of this philosophy filtered into English liter- 
ature early in this century, and at once 
awakened profound interest, and, it is fair 
to say, alarm. Through such men as Cole- 
ridge and the Hares it was easily traced to 
its source in Schelling and Kant. But that 
Schelling and Kant, Fichte and Hegel had 
differentiated this faculty, or something like 
this faculty in the philosophical sphere, was 
against it. The new influence for the time 
was quenched. The unfortunate thing with 
the English neo-Platonists was that they 
paid too little attention to the practical as- 
pects of truth. Had Coleridge done this, 
had Maurice and Hare done this more, we 
should have been farther on to-day with the 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 49 

new Evangelism. These men, and espe- 
cially Coleridge, were far too transcendental 
in their metaphysics to be the prophets of 
the new Evangelism, but with many other 
errors they held the germ of a very great 
truth. With Coleridge the imagination was 
a synthesis of the reasoning power and the 
sensing power. His definition is "that 
reconciling and mediatory power, which, 
incorporating the reason in images of sense, 
and organising (as it were) the flux of the 
senses, by the permanent and self-circling 
energies of the reason, gives birth to a sys- 
tem of symbols harmonious in themselves, 
and consubstantial with the truths of which 
they are the conductors." 1 Again he says 2 
" the grounds of the real truth, the life, the 
substance, the hope, the love, in one word 
the faith, these are derivatives from the 
practical, moral, and spiritual nature and 
being of man." 

I do not stop to inquire here as to where 

1 " Statesman's Manual/ 1 p. 229, vide Rigg, " Modern 
Anglican Theology," p. 15. 

2 " Aids," p. 141. 



50 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

Coleridge's version of " the Light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world " leads. The new Evangelism doubt- 
less will have its apologetics when it exists. 
Nor do I enter upon the question as to how 
far this light exists in every man, or how 
far it is true that those only who are born 
again can see the kingdom of God. These 
are particular applications which may just 
now be passed over. But I should like to 
go on with the general subject by adding 
another quotation, this time from science, 
bearing upon the general subject. 

In 1870 Professor Tyndall wrote an address 
entitled, " On the Scientific Use of the Im- 
agination." The motto or text of this ad- 
dress is taken from a paper read before the 
Royal Society some years ago by its then 
president, Sir Benjamin Brodie. It says: 
" Physical investigation, more than anything 
besides, helps to teach us the actual value 
and right use of the imagination — that 
wondrous faculty which . . properly con- 
trolled by experience and reflection becomes 
the noblest attribute of man ; the source of 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 51 

poetic genius, the instrument of discovery 
to science, without the aid of which Newton 
would never have invented fluxions, nor 
Davy have decomposed the earths and al- 
kalies, nor would Columbus have found 
another continent." Then Tyndall goes 
on to say : " We find ourselves gifted with 
the power of forming mental images of the 
ultra-sensible ; and by this power, when duly 
chastened and controlled, we can lighten the 
darkness which surrounds the world of the 
senses. There are Tories even in Science 
who regard Imagination as a faculty to be 
feared and avoided rather than employed." 
But " Imagination becomes the prime mover 
of the physical discoverer. Newton's pas- 
sage from a falling apple to a falling moon 
was at the outset a leap of the Imagination. 
In Faraday the exercise of this faculty pre- 
ceded all his experiments. ... In fact, 
without this power our knowledge of Nature 
would be a mere tabulation of co-existences 
and sequences." If Tyndall claims so much 
for the scientific use of the Imagination, 
what may we not claim for the religious use 



52 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

of it? What is not possible to an Imagina- 
tion guided by reason and illuminated, as 
we hold it may be, and is, by the Spirit of 
God ? " Without this power," we might 
almost paraphrase from Tyndall, "our know- 
ledge of religion must be, or is, a mere 
tabulation of co-existences and sequences." 
There is one preacher to whom, from his 
printed sermons, I have many times been 
much beholden and from whom I also quote 
a sentence. I do not stay to characterise 
the sermons of Horace Bushnell, but he has 
long been to me a representative man of the 
new Evangelism, although I knew nothing 
of him, of his life, of his methods of thought 
or work. But the other day he died, and 
his life was written. There I have found, 
to my great amazement, that Bushnell's 
method of looking at truth is defined by 
himself as an exercise of the Imagination. 
He has actually published an article, which 
appears in America bearing this title, " The 
Gospel a Gift to the Imagination." Permit 
me to quote a sentence or two from the 
biography. Bushnell is speaking in propria 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 53 

persona. " The Christian Gospel is picto- 
rial Its every line or lineament is traced 
in some image or metaphor, and no inge- 
nuity can get it away from metaphor. No 
animal ever understood a metaphor. That 
belongs to man. . . . All the truths of re- 
ligion are given by images, all God's reve- 
lation is made to the imagination, and 
all the rites, and services, and ceremonies 
of the olden times were only a prepara- 
tion of draperies and figures for what was 
to come, the basis of words sometime 
to be used as metaphors of the Christian 
grace. ' Christ is Gods last metaphor! ' the 
express image of God's person ! and when 
we have gotten all the metaphoric mean- 
ings of His life and death, all that is ex- 
pressed and bodied in His person of God's 
saving help, and new-creating, sin-forgiving, 
reconciling love, the sooner we dismiss all 
speculations on the literalities of His incar- 
nate miracles, His derivation, the composi- 
tion of His person, His suffering, plainly 
transcendent as regards our possible under- 
standing — the wiser we shall be in our 



54 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

discipleship. ... If we try to make a sci- 
ence out of the altar metaphors, it will be 
no gospel that w r e make, but a poor dry jar- 
gon — (rather) a righteousness that makes 
nobody righteous, a justice satisfied by in- 
justice, a mercy on the basis of pay, a penal 
deliverance that keeps on foot all the penal 
liabilities." One passage more. " There is 
no book in the world that contains so many 
repugnances or antagonistic forms of asser- 
tion as the Bible. Therefore, if any man 
please to play off his constructive logic upon 
it, he can easily show it up as the absurdest 
book in the world. But whosoever wants, 
on the other hand, really to behold, and re- 
ceive all truth, and would have the truth- 
world overhang him as an empyrean of stars, 
complex, multitudinous, striving antagonisti- 
cally, yet comprehended, height above height, 
and deep under deep in a boundless score of 
harmony — what man soever content with 
no small rote of logic and catechism, reaches 
with true hunger after this, and will offer 
himself to the many-sided forms of the 
Scripture with a perfectly ingenuous and 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 55 

receptive spirit, he shall find his nature 
flooded with senses, vastnesses and powers 
of truth such as it is even greatness to feel." 
Gentlemen, after the old Evangelism, this 
is a new world to live in. There is air here. 
Take the Gospel as a gift to the Imagina- 
tion, and you are entered into a large place. 
It is like a conversion. We read the Bible 
before with a key. A lamp was put in our 
hands with which to search for truth — 
rather to search for Scripture proofs of a 
truth thrust down our throats. We were 
not told the Bible was the lamp. I once 
saw an hotel-keeper on a starlit night in au- 
tumn erect an electric light to show his 
guests Niagara. It never occurred to the 
creature that God's dim, mystic starlight 
was ten million times more brilliant to man's 
soul than ten million carbons. When will 
it occur to us that God's truth is Lio;ht — 
self-luminous; to be seen because self-lumi- 
nous? When shall we understand that it 
has no speech nor language, that men are to 
come to the naked truth with their naked 
eyes, bringing no candle? The old theol- 



56 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

ogy was luminous once. But it is not 
now. " Election," says Froude in " Bunyan," 
" Election, conversion, day of grace, coming 
to Christ, have been pawed and fingered 
by unctuous hands for near two hundred 
years. The bloom is gone from the flower. 
The plumage, once shining with hues direct 
from Heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The 
most solemn of all realities have been de- 
graded into the passwords of technical the- 
ology." It is from this that we are to 
emancipate ourselves, and, God helping us, 
others. We have a Gospel in the new 
Evangelism which for a hundred years the 
world has been waiting for. We have a 
Gospel which those who even faintly see it 
thank God that they live, and live to preach 
it. But I am not quite done yet. What 
will be, what are, the main hindrances to the 
acceptance of the new Evangelism? They 
are mainly two. 

(i) Unspirituality and (2) Laziness. 

(1) All formal religions are efforts to 
escape spirituality. It matters not what the 
form is — ritual, idols or doctrine, the 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 57 

essence of all is the same — they are devices 
to escape spiritual worship. The carnal 
mind is enmity against God — hates any 
spiritual exercise or effort. This is at the 
bottom of the perpetuation of the old theol- 
ogy. There is nothing a man will not do to 
evade spirituality. Do we not all know 
moods in which we would rather walk 
twenty miles than take family worship? 
And there are moods in which men find it 
of all efforts least easy to come into contact 
with living truth. ( This is always difficult : 
to know His doctrine, a man must do the 
will of God. The supreme factor in arriv- 
ing at spiritual knowledge is not theology, 
it is consecration. But for years and years 
— and it is one of the saddest truths in this 
world — a preacher may go on manipulating 
his theological forms without the slightest 
exercise of religion, unknown to himself, and 
unnoticed by his people. 

The second obstacle is laziness. To 
make doctrinal sermons requires no effort. 
A man has simply to take down his Hodge, 
and there it is. Every Sabbath, though not 



58 THE NEW EVANGELISM 

formally expressed, he has the same heads. 
And the people understand it, or at least 
they understood it twenty years ago, when 
he preached, and preached well and with 
real heart, in the bloom of his early ministry. 
But for years now he has been a mere 
mechanic, a repeater of phrases, a reproducer 
of Hodge. And the people — they too are 
spared all effort. They are delighted with 
their minister. He in these days preaches 
the Gospel. 

A caution may be necessary. In His 
exhaustless wisdom, in speaking on these 
subjects the Lord Jesus said: "No man 
having tasted the old wine straightway 
desireth new." We can speak of these 
things broadly to one another here, but we 
cannot with too much delicacy insinuate the 
new Evangelism upon the Church. The 
old is better, men say; and if any man 
really feels that it is better, I do not know 
that we should urge it upon him at all. 
There are many saints in our Churches, and 
if the old wine is really their life-blood, we 
can but wish them God-speed with all humil- 



THE NEW EVANGELISM 59 

ity. Younger men will come to us, too, 
when our wine is old and the sun has set 
upon our new theology; but to the many 
who are waiting for the dawn, and these are 
many, our evangel may perhaps bring some 
light and fulfil gladness and liberty. 

Least of all have we anything to do with 
wilfully destroying the old. Christ was 
never destructive in His methods. It was 
very exquisite tact, a true understanding of 
men and a delicate respect for them that 
made Him say, " I came not to destroy but 
to fulfil." 



The Method of the 
New Theology, 
and some of its 
Applications 



Address delivered at Theological Society of 
F. C. College, Glasgow, Jan., 1892. 



The Method of the New 
Theology, and some of 
its Applications 

I SHALL begin by congratulating you, and 
myself, on the free theological atmosphere 
in which it is the lot of this society to do its 
work. Never has there been fresher air in 
that dusty realm than there is to-day ; and if 
we pay the price for our freedom in bewilder- 
ment or doubt, in the suspicion of our ene- 
mies, in the helplessness of our wisest friends 
to give us certainty, we have at least the 
sympathy of the best around us, and the 
stimulus of working in an age when theology 
is no longer stagnant, but the most living of 
all the sciences. Of what we seem to be 
leaving behind us we can speak without 
panic or regret. Much of what has been in 
faith or practice is visibly passing away. 



64 THE METHOD OF 

But there is little trace in this process of 
deliberate destruction ; it resembles rather a 
natural decay. And it is the beauty of this 
change, and the guarantee of its wholesome- 
ness, that it has worked without serious 
violence, that it has come, as all great king- 
doms do, almost without observation. 

Though this may appear to us a crisis, it 
is well to remind ourselves that to true 
thought crisis is chronic. There is nothing 
superior about ourselves that we shall have 
the privilege of thinking in a new way about 
theology. It is the world that progresses. 
Modern thought is not a new thing in his- 
tory, nor is it an unrelated thing. It is 
simply the growing fringe of the coral reef, 
the bit of land far out, in contact on the one 
hand with the unexplored sea — the bit of 
land far out in the ocean of unexplored truth 
— on the other with the territory just taken 
in, and the place, in short, where busy minds 
are making the additions to what other busy 
minds have built through the ages into the 
growing continent of knowledge. After all, 
it is only the old reef that we extend ; it is 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 65 

on the past we build ; and the man who ig- 
nores the continuity of the past, and attempts 
to raise an island of his own, may be sure 
that the world's lease of it will be very short. 
New ideas are, in the main, a new light on 
old ideas, and nothing is gained by a ruthless 
handling of the older gospel which our fathers 
held and taught, and which for the most part 
made them better men than their sons. 

But what is this newer theology, and what 
is the direction of the movement where 
changes and perturbations come home to us 
in such a society as this with so great an 
interest? 

To some the new theology is a rearrange- 
ment of doctrines in a new order, a bringing 
of those into prominence which suit the 
need and temper of the age, and an allowing 
of others to sink into shadow because they 
are either distasteful to this generation or 
rest on a basis which it will not honour. 
We are told, for example, that the accent in 
the modern gospel is placed no longer upon 
faith, but rather upon love. We are told by 
others that what they see is the intricate 

5 



66 THE METHOD OF 

theology of Paul beginning to give place 
to the simpler theology of John, or both 
being for the time forgotten in the still 
simpler Christianity of Christ. To others 
the change is from the great Latin concep- 
tion of the Divine Sovereignty of Augustine 
and Calvin to the earlier Greek theology, 
with its emphasis on the immanence of 
Christ, or to its renaissance in the nine- 
teenth century presentation of the incarna- 
tion, and the Fatherhood of God. 

But, important as these characterisations 
are, to contrast the subject-matter of the 
new and the old Evangelism is not enough. 
In a theological society we must get down 
to principles, and I wish in a word to state 
what seems to me the essential nature of 
this change, and to illustrate its practical 
value by plain examples. 

The real contrast between the new and 
the old theology is one of method. The 
way to make a sermon on the old lines, for 
example, was to take down Hodge, or by an 
earlier generation Owen, and see what the 
truth was, then to work from that — to pro- 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 67 

claim what Hodge said, to expound, assert, 
reiterate, appeal in the name of Hodge and 
anathematise and excommunicate everybody 
who did not agree with Hodge. The new 
method declines to begin with Hodge, or 
Owen, or even Calvin. It does not work 
from truth, but towards truth. It aims 
not at asserting a dogma, but at unearthing 
a principle. With all respect to authors, it 
yet declines authority. These are two at 
least of its more obvious marks — it does 
not only allow, but insists on the right of 
private judgment, and it declines authority. 
These propositions mean practically the 
same thing, and so far from being novelties 
are of the first essence of Protestantism. 

It is only to reassert these propositions 
in a different form to say that another char- 
acteristic of the new theology is its essential 
spirituality. We are accustomed to hear it 
opposed on spiritual grounds, but its spiritu- 
ality is really its most outstanding feature, 
and as contrasted with some at least of the 
old theology it has the exclusive right to 
the name. The mark of the old theology 



68 THE METHOD OF 

was that it was made up of forms and propo- 
sitions. Filled no doubt with spirit once, 
that spirit had in many instances wholly 
evaporated, and left men nothing to rest 
their souls on but a set of phrases. 

The task of the newer theology has been 
to pierce below these phrases and seek out 
the ethical truth which underlay them : and 
having found that, to set up the words and 
phrases round it once more if possible ; 
and where not possible, to set up new 
phrases and a more modern expression. It 
is of course because men have been accus- 
tomed to these old forms that they fail to 
recognise the truth when clothed in other 
expression, and therefore raise the cry of 
heresy against all who take the more inward 
or spiritual view. 

Two classes in the community must of 
necessity, and always, oppose the new foun- 
dation — the Pharisee who is not able to see 
spirit for forms, and the lazy man who will 
not take the trouble to see spirit in form. It 
is always easier to assert truth than to ex- 
amine it, to accept it ready made than to 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 69 

verify it for oneself, and we must always have 
a class who are guilty of these intellectual 
sins, who mistake credulity for faith and 
superstition for knowledge. The calm way 
in which these men assume that they are 
right and put all the rest of us on our de- 
fence is a miracle of effrontery, a miracle 
only exceeded in wonder by the tolerant way 
it is submitted to. I am not sure but that if 
Christ were among us He would not denounce 
the Pharisee as He did of old. 

But it is not enough to say that the new 
theological quest is a movement in the 
direction of spirituality. What is that spiritu- 
ality ? Is it a mere vagueness, a substitution 
of the shifting sand of the mysterious, and 
the undefined for the buttressed logic of the 
older doctrines ? On the contrary, it is the 
most definite thing in the world. Instead 
of relaxing the hold on truth, the new 
method makes the grasp of the mind upon it 
a thousand times more certain. Instead of 
blurring the vision of unseen things, it ren- 
ders them self-transparent; instead of making 
acceptance a matter of mere opinion, or of 



70 THE METHOD OF 

upbringing, or of tradition, it forces truth 
on the mind with a new authority — an 
authority never before to the same extent 
introduced into theological teaching. That 
authority is the authority of law. The basis 
— like the basis of all modern knowledge — 
of the coming theology is a scientific basis. 
It is a basis on great ethical principles. It is 
not a series of conceptions deduced from 
another central conception or grouped round 
a favoured doctrine of a favourite Divine — a 
Calvinism, a Lutherans^, an Arminian^^, 
or any conceivable ism. It is a grouping 
round law, spiritual, moral, natural law, a 
structure reared on the eternal order of the 
world, and therefore natural, self-evident, 
self-sustaining and invulnerable. 

This method, dealing as it does with law 
and spirit, ignores nothing, denies nothing, 
and formally supplants nothing in the older 
subject-matter ; but it tries to get deeper into 
the heart of it, and seeks a new life even in 
doctrines which seem to have long since 
petrified into stone. This was largely 
Christ's own method. He dealt with prin- 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 71 

ciples — His teaching was mainly excava- 
tion — the disinterring of hidden things, the 
bringing to light of the profound ethical 
principles hidden beneath Rabbinic subtleties 
and Pharisaic forms. 

The Reformation — Protestantism — these 
were large attempts in the same direction, 
and modern thought is the heir to this spirit. 
Being a process of growth, and not a series 
of operations upon specific theological posi- 
tions, this method is in the best sense con- 
structive. It can never destroy except empty 
forms. To be negative, to oppose or de- 
nounce time-honoured doctrines is poor 
work — poor work which unfortunately many 
minds and pens and pulpits are continually 
trying to do. The only legitimate way to 
destroy an old doctrine is Christ's way to 
fulfil it. Instead of busying themselves 
about its death and calling their congrega- 
tions ostentatiously to attend the funeral, 
the new theology will invite them rather to 
witness anew the resurrection of the undying 
spirit still hidden beneath the worn-out body 
of its older form. 



^ THE METHOD OF 

As an illustration of what I mean, I pro- 
pose to select one or two Christian doctrines 
which in their current forms have lost their 
power for thinking men, and try to show 
how these may live once more and play a 
powerful part in current teaching. One or 
two of the greatest Christian truths have 
already been so abundantly re-illuminated 
and re-spiritualised by modern literature and 
preaching that one need only name them. 
An admirable case is the doctrine of inspira- 
tion. It is idle to deny that the authority of 
the Bible was all but gone within this gen- 
eration. The old view had become abso- 
lutely untenable, misleading and mischievous. 
But from the hands of reverent men who 
have studied the inward characters of these 
books, we have again got our Bible. The 
theory of development, the study of the Bible 
as a library of religious writings rather than 
as a book ; the treatment of the writers as 
authors and not as pens ; the mere discovery 
that religion has not come out of the Bible, 
but that the Bible has come out of religion : 
these announcements have not only destroyed 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 73 

with a breath a hundred infidel objections to 
Scripture, but opened up a world of new life 
and interest to Christian people. 

So thoroughly has the spiritual as opposed 
to the mechanical theory of inspiration im- 
bued all recent teaching that the battle for 
Scotland at least may be said to be now won. 
If there is anything further to be said on the 
subject, indeed, it is to caution ourselves 
against going too far or being very positive. 

Modern criticism in this country, espe- 
cially of the Old Testament, is not in a good 
way. The permission to embark upon it at 
all is sudden, and very few men are suffi- 
ciently equipped for a responsible recon- 
struction. Probably in Old Testament 
criticism there are not ten competent ex- 
perts in the country, and these are all more 
or less disagreed, and, what is more, afraid to 
announce their disagreements lest the others 
should turn and rend them. One of the 
greatest of these ten has just written an im- 
portant book. I happen to know that it is 
being handed about among the nine for a 
review in a certain high-class theological 



74 THE METHOD OF 

monthly, and not a man of them will touch 
it. 

Hasty conclusions as to authorship or 
canonicity are as foreign to the scientific 
spirit as the old dogmatism. Guinness 
Rogers has well pointed out that in the far 
future, when English has become a dead 
language, almost no internal evidence would 
allow the literary critic to allocate the author- 
ship of John Gilpin, e.g., to the melancholy 
recluse who wrote the Olney hymns ; and in 
dealing with questions of Biblical authorship 
the minute scholarship of this day, based on 
favourite words and particular styles of 
thought, is often in danger of ignoring such 
broader facts as the versatility of human na- 
ture, the changing moods of thinkers, the 
contradictions which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde exhibit within the same man's soul at 
the same period or at contrasted periods of his 
life of which history can keep no cognisance. 

This remark applies with even greater 
force to the subject-matter of the Books. 
We have treatises written, 'for instance, on 
the theology of Peter. Men talk of the 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 75 

Petrine conception of this and the Petrine 
presentation of that; they contrast the 
Petrine standpoint with the Pauline and the 
Johannine, and even go the length of fixing 
the proportion in which the various theologi- 
cal truths were held in the Petrine system. 
The absurdity of all this may be seen from a 
single fact. The entire Petrine remains that 
have come down to us and upon which all 
these elaborate structures are reared amount 
to a page or two, all that the apostle ever 
wrote or all that is left to us. They could 
be read to a congregation in exactly half the 
time that it would take a minister to deliver 
a half-hour's sermon. Think of the absurdity 
of judging a man's theology, or the propor- 
tion in which he held its various parts, by 
half a sermon, and you will never again hear 
the word Petrine without a smile. The 
men, and especially the Germans, who allow 
internal evidence — not seeing its exces- 
sive limitations — to be abused in this 
way are the true literalists, and their pro- 
vincial analysis can only hinder the victory 
of a spiritual cause. If the new theology 



76 THE METHOD OF 

is the scientific spirit, that class of work is 
its stultification. 

But to pass on to another instance. The 
unearthing of the tremendous ethical prin- 
ciple underlying the atonement is now restor- 
ing that central doctrine to theology just 
when in its mechanical forms it was on the 
point of being discredited by every thinking 
mind. The Salvation Army preacher, it is 
true, still preaches it as a syllogism, and pays 
the penalty in the utter apathy or mysti- 
fication of his hearers, at least on that point. 
But no man who preaches the spirit of 
it, instead of the phrases of it, will 
lose his audience. The man who makes 
words, even Bible words, the substitute for 
thought, can never be understood of the 
common people at the present day. There 
is nothing the street preacher needs to 
be warned against with more earnestness 
than the mechanical preaching of the syllo- 
gisms of the atonement. One listens often 
and with admiration and respect to the pow- 
erful way the street preacher brings home 
the great facts of personal sin to the crowd 



THE NEW THEOLOGY y 7 

around him, to his almost melting appeal for 
instant decision to this offer of salvation — 
nearly always in my experience glowing with 
real enthusiasm and backed w 7 ith an almost 
contagious faith and hope. But when he 
tries at that point to answer the simple in- 
quiry, How? when he stands face to face 
with the question of the drunkard, leaning 
against the lamp-post, " What must I, the 
drunkard, standing here to-night in Argyle 
Street, do to be saved ? " he takes refuge 
in some text or metaphor, a proposition, 
and passes on. What I complain of in 
Gospel addresses is that many have no Gos- 
pel in them, no tangible thing for a drowning 
man to really see and clutch. They break 
down at the very point where they ought to 
be most strong and luminous. To tell the 
average wife-beater to take shelter behind the 
blood or to hide himself in the cleft is to put 
him off with a phrase. I do not object to 
these metaphors, I believe in metaphors. I 
go the length of holding that you never get 
nearer to truth than in a metaphor ; but you 
have not told this man the whole truth about 



78 THE METHOD OF 

your metaphor, nor have you touched his 
soul or his affections with what lies beneath 
that metaphor ; and it falls upon his ear as a 
tale he has heard a thousand times before. 
It is not obstinacy that keeps this poor man 
from religion — it is pure bewilderment as 
to what in the world we are driving at. The 
new theology when it preaches the atone- 
ment will not be less loyal to that doctrine, 
but more. It will not take refuge in the 
poor excuse for slipshod preaching and un- 
thought-out doctrines that we must wait for 
God's light to break. God's light breaks 
through some men's preaching, through some 
clear, honest, convincing statement of truth, 
and not occultly. Faith cometh by hearing, 
and if our plan of salvation is not telling 
upon our audience it is blasphemy to blame 
God's spirit. The blame lies in our own 
spirit and in our offering words instead of 
spirit, and in our neglect to spend time and 
thought, in trying to get down to the professed 
meaning and omnipotent dynamic of the law 
of Sacrifice. 

If a man has not something more to say 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 79 

about the atonement than the conventional 
phrases, let him be silent. By introducing 
the words from time to time he may earn the 
cheap reputation of being orthodox; but it 
is for him to consider whether that is an 
object for which his conscience will let him 
work. There are thousands of tender and 
conscientious souls now in our midst who 
cannot find that foothold on the conventional 
doctrine which they are led to believe their 
teachers have, and without which they feel 
themselves excommunicate from the work of 
the Church and the fold of Christ. If we 
see no further behind these words, let us say 
so, and not keep up this fraud, or preach 
these words, until we have sunk our spirits 
in them and can teach them with vital force 
and truth. 

Gentlemen, I do not for a moment mean 
that we are to treat our congregations to 
dissertations on biology. Nature — human 
nature — are to be to us but discoveries of 
things as they are, the expression of prin- 
ciple, the theatre on whose stupendous stage 



80 THE METHOD OF 

each can see with his own eyes the great 
laws act. 

And this leads me to a final statement. 
We have seen that the method of the new 
Evangelism is to deal with principles. The 
mental act by which we are to search for 
truth, truth being in this spiritual form, is 
not therefore to be so much the reason, but 
the imagination. We are to put up truth 
when we deliver truth to others, not in the 
propositional form, but in some visual form 
— some form in which it will be seen with- 
out any attempt to prove. Truth never 
really requires to be proved. The best you 
can do for a law is to exhibit it. 

Gentlemen, as a preparation for the work 
of the new Evangelism in which you are to 
spend your lives, I commend you to the 
study of the principles of the laws of God in 
nature, and in human nature: the develop- 
ment of that seeing power, as opposed to 
mere logic, which discerns the unseen 
through the seen. About the greatest thing 
a man can do, Ruskin tells us, is to see 
something, and tell others what he sees. 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 81 

The Gospel as Christ gave it was a gift to 
the seeing power in man. His speech was 
almost wholly addressed to the imagination, 
to the imagination in its true sense, and this, 
which is the highest language of science, is 
also, the language of poetry and of the 
poetry of the soul, which is religion. Unless 
we can fill the new theology with what the 
soul sees and feels, and sees to be true and 
feels to be living, it will be as juiceless and 
inert as the old dogmatic. 

For it is only a living spirit of truth that 
can touch dead spirit, and the test of any 
theology is not that it is logically clear or 
even intellectually solid, but that it carries 
with it some sanctifying power. 

These examples of the rejuvenescence of 

old truths under the more spiritual treatment 

of an ethical theology are more or less 

obvious. I wish in the time that remains to 

apply the method a little more in detail to 

one particular department of theology, which 

is perhaps less intruded upon by modern 

teachers. The revolt of the moral sense of 

this country against the doctrine of a physical 

6 



82 THE METHOD OF 

hell, and the appeal to a Judgment Day, has 
lately led to almost complete silence on the 
whole subject of eschatology. Is this great 
theme or any part of it — say the conception 
of a Day of Judgment — not capable of a 
deeper ethical treatment? If the Divine 
judgment upon sin lies in the natural law of 
heredity, may we not find among the laws of 
the moral world some larger and more uni- 
versal principle of judgment which shall 
restore the appeal of these forgotten dogmas 
to their place in religious teaching? It is 
quite clear we must discuss this or remain 
silent. No man can now say such words to 
his people as these — I quote from no less an 
authority than Jonathan Edwards, — "The 
God that holds you over the pit of Hell, 
much as one holds a spider or some loath- 
some insect over the fire, abhors you. It is 
nothing but His Hand that holds you from 
falling into the fire every moment ; it is to be 
ascribed to nothing else that you did not go 
to Hell last night; and there is no other 
reason why you have not dropped into Hell 
since you arose in the morning. . . . There 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 83 

is nothing else to be given as a reason why 
you do not this very moment drop down into 
Hell." 1 

That kind of thing is not over, though we 
may hear little of it. 

Many of you have seen some, at least, of 
the great classical pictures of the Last Judg- 
ment. Here [in the next chapter] is Rus- 
kins account of the greatest of them all, the 
Last Judgment of Tintoretto, which hangs 
on a well-known church wall in Venice, in 
full view of the congregation. 

1 Guinness Rogers' " Present-Day Religion and The- 
ology," p. 150. 



Survival of the 
Fittest 



Formed part of preceding address 



Survival of the 
Fittest 

PERHAPS the most weird picture in 
" Modern Painters " is the description 
of Tintoretto's " Last Judgment." Dante in 
poetry, Giotto, Orcagna, and Michael Angelo 
on canvas, have spent their imaginations on 
the unimaginable theme; but Tintoretto 
alone, says Mr. Ruskin, has grappled with 
this awful event in its verity : " Bat-like, out 
of the holes and caverns and shadows of 
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay- 
heaps heave, rattling and adhering into 
half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl and 
startle, and struggle up among the putrid 
weeds with the clay clinging to their clotted 
hair, and their heavy eyes sealed with the 
earth darkness yet, like his of old who went 
his way unseeing to Siloam Pool; shaking 



88 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

off one by one the dreams of the prison- 
home, hardly hearing the clangour of the 
trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet 
more, as they awake, by the white light of 
the new Heaven, until the great vortex of 
the four winds bears up their bodies to the 
judgment seat; the firmament is all full of 
them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, 
and floats, and falls in the interminable, 
inevitable light ; the bright clouds are dark- 
ened with them as with thick snow, currents 
of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now 
soaring up slowly s farther, and higher, and 
higher still, till the eye and the thought can 
follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their 
inward faith and by the angel powers in- 
visible, now hurled in countless drifts of 
horror before the breath of their condemna- 
tion." 1 Such is the picture, "not typically 
nor symbolically," Mr. Ruskin tells us, " but 
as they may see it who shall not sleep, but 
be changed." 

That artist and critic have drunk in the 
spirit of their dreadful subject may be un- 

1 "Modern Painters," vol. ii., p. 183. 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 89 

questioned. That pictures of the Last Judg- 
ment, whether with pen or pigment, serve a 
certain function, is also beyond dispute. To 
deny this would be to condemn the whole of 
sacred art. And to have the mute appeal of 
the great religious masterpieces silenced in 
the thronged galleries of Europe, where they 
have stood like beacons to the passing 
stream of life for centuries, would be a 
blow to Christianity. But it is no less 
true that to a class of minds the dramatic 
aspects of the Last Judgment appeal in 
vain. The material imagery, we are as- 
sured, the marshalling of the prisoners at 
the trumpet call, the Judge and the great 
White Throne, are presentations to an age 
which has passed away. The very tying- 
down of Judgment to a Day, the whole 
machinery of a human court " which meets, 
goes through its docket and adjourns," are 
out of harmony with the other ways of 
God; and, whatever reality may underlie it, 
the conception, as it stands at present, is 
too gross and artificial to find acceptance 
with a scientific age. 



90 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

Many will wonder what science means by 
this fastidiousness. Some will quite fail 
even to enter into the state of mind which 
feels it, or which presumes to question the 
congruity or incongruity of what has been 
revealed. Nevertheless, this is a real diffi- 
culty. And, whatever be its genesis, we are 
compelled to recognise an attitude of mind 
which somehow disqualifies its possessor 
from being greatly influenced by such spec- 
tacular representations as have been named. 
Our feelings are a great mystery ; the least 
definable are often those which sway us most. 
But to meet this state of mind, rather than 
to defend its reasonableness or ban its pre- 
sumption, is the question before us. For the 
difficulty, after giving up a truth in one form, 
of winning it back in another is very great. 
And it is certainly true that for want of a 
connecting link between the popular doctrines 
of eschatology, and the facts and ways of na- 
ture and of the moral life, many who in this 
instance have repudiated the form have come 
to abandon the substance. To restore the 
substance and meaning of the idea of judg- 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 91 

ment by seeking to renovate the form is our 
object now. We are far from claiming that 
the form to be presented is the best, still less 
that it contains the whole of the substance. 
Truth has many forms, and the whole sub- 
stance of this truth is, perhaps, not given as 
yet to man to know. But upon this, the 
most solemn thought that has ever been pre- 
sented to the conscience of mankind, it is im- 
possible that reason should be silent, or nature 
withhold its contribution from such a theme. 
We have hinted that the scientific diffi- 
culty in accepting the doctrine in its conven- 
tional form is one of standpoint. But the 
particular point of the objection is worth 
defining, and for a remarkable reason. What 
science really rebels at in the old doctrine is 
its externalness. It is outside nature, a for- 
eign and unanticipated element, a breach of 
continuity. And what science would like to 
see is a universal principle — a principle, if 
possible, operating from within, bound up 
with nature itself, and involved in the general 
system of things. Now, such a claim coming 
from science is in every way astonishing and 



92 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

unexpected. For observe what it is. It is 
simply a demand upon religion for a further 
spirituality. It is really materialism that 
science objects to in the old doctrine — it 
objects to a material throne, and bar, and 
trumpet, to an external law, to a judgment 
from without rather than from within. The 
protest, in fact, is a rebuke to religion for the 
grossness of its conceptions, for its tardy 
abandonment of the letter, for the perman- 
ence it has given to provisional forms — in 
short, for its unspirituality. 

Nor is this the first instance in which 
science has called the attention of religion to 
this crude externalness in its ideas. In sev- 
eral well-known instances it has already 
imposed upon religion the useful task of re- 
modelling its doctrines ; and in each case the 
gain has been in the direction of greater 
inwardness, greater naturalness, greater spiri- 
tuality. And the still more interesting fact 
remains to be noted, that it is generally 
science itself which supplies the material for 
the remodelled doctrine. As it destroys, it 
fulfils — the very discoveries which begat its 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 93 

doubt become, wnen rearranged and incor- 
porated by religion, the materials for a firmer 
faith. For instance, the grossness and exter- 
nalness of the old theory of a Six Days' 
Creation was once a serious stumbling-block 
to science. Students of nature were unac- 
customed to find nature working in ways so 
abrupt ; facts proving the slow development 
of the world had accumulated ; the Divine- 
fiat hypothesis was challenged, and finally 
abandoned. And then out of these very 
facts grew the new and beautiful theory that 
Creation was not a stupendous and catastro- 
phic operation performed from without, but 
a silent process acting from within. So, 
having destroyed the old conception, science 
itself contributed the new — a conception 
which it could not only intelligently accept, 
but which for religion also left everything 
more worthy of worship than before. 

Again, consider a case where the difficulty 
of believing an accepted theory is not physi- 
cal but moral. Take the second command- 
ment. The impression this law would leave 
on the early mind would certainly be that, 



94 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

in visiting the iniquities of fathers upon 
children, God weighed each case separately 
and administered special judgment upon 
cases of exceptional enormity. God admin- 
istered punishment, that is to say, from with- 
out, by judicial enactments, augmenting or 
remitting sentence according to discretion. 
But instead of referring the enforcement of 
this commandment to an external court, we 
now see that execution of its sentences are 
transferred to the laws of nature. Instead 
of working from without, from above nature, 
it works, in ordinary circumstances at least, 
within it. It is, in fact, the ordinary law of 
heredity — the law of transmission from sire 
to son of the dispositions, tendencies, temp- 
tations, and diseases of the parent. Now, 
while losing nothing here, much is gained. 
The idea of judgment for sin is as much in 
the law as ever, the personality of the Judge 
is as before ; but the seat of judgment has 
changed, and the mechanism of justice is 
replaced by the working of inherent laws. 
The very laws of nature have become " the 
hands of the living God." 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 95 

Now with these two examples before us 
of the change of emphasis from the external 
to the internal, may we not ask w T hether any 
parallel change is warranted in the case of 
the larger doctrine now in view? Should 
it not also have an inward ground, a discov- 
erable law? Is it an operation from with- 
out, or a process from within ? Is there no 
anticipation, in short, in nature of a final 
judgment? As it is not intended to deal 
here directly with the Scripture references, 
I will leave them with two remarks. 

1. The Scriptures are not explicit — are, 
in fact, very far from explicit. Let any one 
collate the various references to this subject 
— and they are very numerous — sift them 
with whatever care he likes, arrange them 
upon whatever principle he likes, or upon 
all known principles of interpretation up to 
the present time, and he will find them per- 
plexing, and even contradictory. Here, if 
anywhere, then, there is room for the New 
Testament to come in and seek out a basis 
of law. And I select the field as an illustra- 
tion, simply because it is a remote one, and 
at the first blush most unpromising. 



96 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

2. That while Christ lays down, and espe- 
cially in the parables of Judgment, the great 
ethical principles of eschatology, nearly all 
beyond that, in His teaching and in Paul's, 
has a purely Jewish or Rabbinic basis. No 
theme is more prominent in Jewish litera- 
ture. The older portions of the book of 
Enoch, for example, contain constant allu- 
sions to a " Great Judgment," " The Day 
of the Great Judgment," " The Great Day of 
Judgment," " The Great Day," " The Day of 
Judgment," " The Righteous Judgment," and 
" The Last Judgment for all Eternity." The 
Sibylline books and the Apocalypses gener- 
ally teem with detailed descriptions of such 
an event variously conceived of, variously 
dated, and for the most part having a politi- 
cal origin and significance. " Even the idea 
of ' a day ' (according to Stanton) does not 
seem to have been originally taken from a 
judge holding court, but from a terrible tri- 
umphal conqueror executing vengeance in a 
day of battle and slaughter." 1 

1 Stanton, " Jewish and Christian Messiah." Clark, 
Edinburgh, p. 136. 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 97 

But to proceed. The position to be now 
taken up is not only the one which will be 
obvious on a little thought — that Judgment 
is not an act to be accomplished, an act sud- 
den, spectacular, explosive, but a quiet pro- 
cess now and ever going on — but that that 
process is simply the operation of one of the 
widest and most familiar of the Laws of 
Nature. 

This law let me first bring forward in its 
simplicity as mere natural law ; later on, we 
shall reach its ethical relations ; and I must 
be pardoned for speaking here my own 
native tongue of Science rather than at- 
tempting a translation into ethics. The 
name of this law is the Survival of the 
Fittest. Eternal life under the last analysis 
is a question of the survival of the fittest. 
And Judgment is a question of natural selec- 
tion. In spite of the constantly reiterated 
protest of popular theology that science and 
religion part company for ever over this law, 
in spite of the apparent objection that while 
in nature the prize is to the strong, and the 
weak go to the wall, in the kingdom of grace 

7 




98 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

the bruised reed is not broken and the 
weary and heavy laden win ; it is the most 
certain of truths that in nature and grace 
alike the law of the survival of the fittest 
olds. A moment's reflection will show that 
in thus contrasting the genius of nature and 
the genius of Christianity by way of objec- 
tion, the word fitness is used in two totally 
different senses. In the one case it is em- 
ployed in a biological, in the other in an 
ethical sense. When it is said that a fish 
survives in water because it is " fit " for it, all 
that is meant is that the organisation of the 
fish is, in certain respects, adapted for this 
element. And when it is said that eternal 
life is a question of the survival of the fittest, 
what is implied is that it is a question of the 
survival of the adapted — of those who, by 
some means, have become specially fitted or 
equipped for living in this element. In this 
— the only possible scientific sense — it is 
literally and eternally true that the future 
state is a question of the survival of the 
fittest. The survival of ^he fittest means, 
then, only the survival of the adapted. It is 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 99 

not asserted, meantime, that the survival of 
the adapted means also the survival of the 
worthiest. Whether worthiness be, after all, 
the same thing as fitness will be referred to 
presently. But that no moral quality what- 
ever is involved in the operation of this law 
is a point to be marked, for the basis of judg- 
ment for which we contend is one involved 
in the very constitution of the world. 

The essential thing in any organism in 
relation to its surroundings, the characteris- 
tic quality on which life depends, is adapta- 
tion to environment. If an organism is to 
survive in water, it must be adapted to the 
aquatic condition by the development of a 
water-breathing faculty, a gill. If it is to 
change its surroundings so as to live in air 
— as actually happens during the life-history 
of the common frog — it must become 
adapted to correspond with the atmosphere 
by the development of an air-breathing 
apparatus, or lung. So if the highest or- 
ganism is to be in correspondence with the 
Divine Environment, he must be adapted to 
it. He, the Christian, must have undergone 



ioo SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

some process of adaptation to environment 
— theologically called sanctification — in 
virtue of which he is able to correspond, to 
commune, with God. Only those so adapted 
can possibly exist in this element, even as those 
only equipped with gill can breathe in water, 
or those with lung in air. But this is simply 
to repeat once more that the adapted survive ; 
that the fit survive ; that they are " selected " to 
live by the possession of the required faculty. 
Suppose, now, to point the application, 
these varying degrees of adaptation to envi- 
ronment to be tested by actual experiment. 
A pool teeming with living organisms sud- 
denly dries up. The vast majority of these 
organisms are adapted for an aquatic en- 
vironment and for no other, and with the 
removal of this they perish. In terms of 
adaptation to environment they are judged. 
One or two, however, such as the water- 
newt, in addition to the special adaptation 
required for the liquid element, possess the 
further power of corresponding with the 
earth and air in virtue of the possession of 
a lung. So long, therefore, as it can remain 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 101 

in correspondence with the earth and air, 
it lives. Suppose next some climatic change 
to occur, or some physical catastrophe such 
as the sudden eruption of a volcano, and 
that those who escaped from the water are 
no longer able to adapt themselves to this 
further change. In terms of environment 
they are judged. Suppose, however, that 
another organism, man, within the affected 
area was able to escape. His survival is 
due solely to the superior complexity of 
his organisation. By his intelligence he 
foretold the calamity, and prepared for it, 
or with the aid of his inventions he swiftly 
withdrew to a safe distance. But suppose 
next, by a mightier catastrophe, the earth 
itself should collide with another star, and 
make his new environment again untenable. 
What is to become of him ? It will depend 
on what correspondences remain, and on 
what environment still exists. But the old 
law holds. He will go where he is fit for, 
and be in what is fit for him. If he has 
any correspondence with eternity, he will go 
on living in terms of these correspondences. 



102 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

He will go on living in terms of his cor- 
respondences — this is the point of it all. 
And this is natural selection; it is another 
way of saying that the fit to survive, survive. 
And is there not here a principle of Judg- 
ment ? The organisms in the drying pool, 
the water-newt upon the quaking land, the 
man at the worlds collapse — each is allo- 
cated to his place according to his corre- 
spondences. No external act of choice takes 
place ; there is an inherent claim to live, 
or an inherent necessity to die, in the organ- 
ism itself. This claim is founded on the 
fulfilment or non-fulfilment of an essential 
and imperative condition ; it is a necessary 
consequence of the law of the survival of the 
fittest; it is not an arbitrary appointment 
or reward, it is the natural evolution of an 
organism in terms of its correspondences. 

Nature sits upon no far-off throne, like 
a capricious goddess, signalling which shall 
live and which shall die. But in the very 
inmost being of each she discloses a law of 
life or death. If an animal dies, its death 
is the natural culmination of its own past, 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 103 

of tendencies, proclivities, and processes 
already at work within ; if it lives, its sur- 
vival is the direct result of what it at the 
moment is. If death is, in such cases, in 
any sense a judgment, it is a judgment 
solely on unfitness. And if in dissolution 
the sentence of a judge is being carried out, 
it is not by an external operation, but by an 
inward process. And so with man. It is 
not necessary that he should be judged from 
without; he will be judged from within. 
He is his own judge. 

No witnesses need be called to give their 
evidence ; the witnesses are himself. No 
gaolers need be told off to watch him ; he 
cannot run away from himself. No external 
court need formulate the case against him ; 
his own past has done it, his own past is it. 
No Judge need pronounce sentence at a 
Last Day; as he stands there to-day, he 
has sentenced himself, — as he stands there, 
he is prisoner, gaoler, court, witnesses, all 
in one, all the past collected and focussed 
in his present, all the present defining and 
determining the unknown, but not unantici- 



104 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

pated, future. As in the past evolution of 
the earth the nebulous gases combined in 
the order of their affinities and arranged 
themselves in the order of their densities, 
so in the future evolution will each go to 
his own, living on in terms of his corre- 
spondences, in the order determined by his 
spiritual affinities. 

This principle of judgment pervades with 
its invisible presence the whole of nature. 
Every plant, insect, animal, man — man phy- 
sical, mental, moral, spiritual — is daily and 
hourly on trial. This court is never opened 
and never closed. It is a vast, mysterious, 
self-acting organisation, ramifying through 
the whole of nature, and, without resistance 
or appeal, each living thing obeys its 
verdict. 

But, in the case of an organism, what is it 
that betrays the insufficiency of its corre- 
spondences ? It is the presentation to it of 
the new environment. So long as the fish 
lives in the stream, it will neither feel nor 
exhibit any want of adaptation to other sur- 
roundings. But when the stream runs dry ? 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 105 

So long as the swallow lives in the English 
climate, its joyful existence is complete. But 
when the English summer wanes and the 
chills of winter come ? So long as man lives 
on in the environment of this present world, 
his correspondences, or some of them, are 
satisfied. But when this present world is 
done ? Then is the great trial. Then is the 
sifting time. Then is the Judgment Da)'. 
Then his sufficiency or insufficiency is finally 
betrayed. In presence of the new environ- 
ment — not by any book opened, word 
spoken, past recalled — in the mere presence 
of it, he is made manifest. This reflex in- 
fluence of environment has been a common- 
place with theology from the beginning. It 
is remarkable how full revelation is of this 
still future truth — remarkable also that, 
being a thing to come, nature should so an- 
ticipate and confirm it. No thought is more 
frequent or more solemn in the Biblical ac- 
counts of the last things than that at the 
appearing of Christ a mighty change will 
sweep over the moral world — a sudden 
revolution in men's opinions — a swift re- 



io6 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

versal of all human judgments. And this is 
not an unlooked-for crisis. It is the natural 
effect of the new environment — or of the 
sudden prominence of the new environment 
— upon organisms well or ill prepared to live 
in it. Hence it is not only that in this 
Presence the secrets of all hearts shall be 
revealed, nor that human lives projected 
against His will henceforth and evermore ap- 
pear in colours black as hell. But it will be 
that vital relations will manifest themselves 
in the case of every man ; his correspon- 
dences will continue, or come short. All 
that he is, the little that he is, all that he is 
fit for, all that he is not fit for, will be re- 
vealed. In terms of these, in himself, and at 
a glance, he will know whether he is to live 
or die. With his own eyes he will see the 
great gulf fixed ; with his own reason he will 
see why it cannot be crossed. 

" The appearing of Christ," says Van 
Oosterzee, " brings about separation (k/hctis) 
between the one who has the Son and the 
one who has Him not ; or, rather, the differ- 
ence, already present, unseen, is in conse- 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 107 

quence of His coming and His work, brought 
to light. Thus the Christ becomes neces- 
sarily Judge, even where He desires to be 
Saviour." 1 And to the same effect Paul, 
" For we must all be made manifest before 
the Judgment-seat of Christ." This is that 
being " weighed in the balance " in which 
some shall be " found wanting." This is 
what Paul foresaw when he said, " We must 
all be made manifest before the Judgment- 
seat of Christ." 

This, again, is not peculiar to Christianity 
or to science, but universal law. The mo- 
ment I go to a high-class concert, in the 
matter of musical taste I am judged. My 
musical soul, or soullessness, is instantly 
made manifest. The moment I enter a 
picture gallery I am judged. My corre- 
spondences are or are not. I am weighed 
in the balances. That day declares it. 

What man is, what God is — these are the 
materials for the anticipation of judgment. 
They are in each man's hands, and in terms 
of them he can here and now decide. To 

1 " Theology of the New Testament," fourth ed. p. 348. 



108 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

no man, surely, is it ever given to draw aside 
the veil and forecast the future for another. 
Personal to the individual, the possession of 
the appropriate correspondences — the adap- 
tation to the Divine is truly known to one- 
self alone. And we are therefore warned by 
the New Testament: "Judge nothing before 
the time, 'until the Lord come,' who both 
will bring to light the hidden things of dark- 
ness, and will make manifest the counsels of 
the heart." But so far from precluding a 
judgment of our own upon ourselves, the 
very inability of our neighbour, the impo- 
tence to help of those who know and love us 
best, the isolation and solitude in which we 
must settle this question of life and death, 
create a warrant for self-examination such as 
no serious man will allow himself to evade. 
" Examine yourselves," says Paul, " whether 
ye be in the faith ; prove your own selves." 
And again, " Make your calling and election 

sure." 

» . . • • 

Mr. Darwin tells us that the object of nat- 
ural selection — the object of the fittest sur- 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 109 

viving — is " the improvement of organisms." 
It is the means by which nature shows her 
appreciation, not of fitness alone, but of fit- 
ness in the direction of advancement. It is 
her splendid effort to ennoble life, to exalt 
and purify creation, to bring all organisms to 
an ever-increasing perfectness and complex- 
ity, to carry on the evolution of the world to 
higher and higher beauty, usefulness, and 
efficacy. How keen her desire to compass 
this great end, how enormous the value she 
sets on the result, may be feebly inferred 
from the terrible price she is prepared to 
pay for it. If nature is in earnest about one 
thing, it is quality. To this end all her 
labour tends ; she works, and waits ; she de- 
stroys, and re-creates. And surely nothing 
is more significant for religion, nothing 
could more eloquently express its own deep- 
est aim for the world, than this mighty grav- 
itation of all in nature towards fitness, 
wholeness, perfectness. Even Lamarck 
finds himself so impressed by the silent wit- 
nesses around him to the great ascent of life 
as to believe in " an innate and inevitable 



no SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

tendency towards perfection in all organic 
beings." 

But it is to the various eschatological the- 
ories of theology that its voice most distinctly 
speaks. Has Antinomianism no tacit fol- 
lowing in the modern Church ? Let those 
who have to meet this subtle and monstrous 
and unaccountable perversion explain the 
meaning and press home the necessity of 
adaptation to environment. Let it be shown 
that fitness to survive is tested, not by pro- 
fession, but by experiment. How easily in 
the theological forms may faith be a corre- 
spondence, a communion, a living bond with 
a living Christ, or (it may be) a mere belief, 
a barren formula, a name to live. There is 
an ecclesiastical Christ and a living Christ ; 
there is a historical Christ and a risen 
Christ; there is a theological Christ and a 
personal Christ. Is it not clear, alike from 
reason, from nature, and from revelation that 
only by contact — immediate, personal, liv- 
ing — with a living, present Christ the eter- 
nal life can be a root in the heart of man ? 
We turn to yet another tendency of the 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST in 

time. More and more the doctrines of Uni- 
versalism seem to spread. 

Where, then, it may be asked, is mercy ? 
The answer is — (i) It will be seen presently 
that the whole scheme is established only in 
mercy ; but (2) even mercy has its laws. 
The object of mercy can never be to " save " 
the unfit, L e., to save the unadapted, which is 
inconceivable and impossible. Mercy can 
make the unfit fit ; it has a vast machinery 
for this one purpose. That is its work, its 
line, the only line it can take. To " fit " the 
unfit is a possibility, to " save " them being 
unfit, to sentence them unfit in either rela- 
tion to a heaven or a hell is impossible. 
The only conceivable ways to save a fish 
tossed on the rocks by a billow are to sud- 
denly supply it with a lung, which is impos- 
sible, or to turn it back into its own element. 
On similar principles the unfit in relation to 
God cannot be saved, the fit can by no pos- 
sibility be lost. 

As the evangelist said of Emerson, " Emer- 
son was one of the most beautiful souls I ever 
knew. There is something wrong with his 



112 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

machinery somewhere, but I do not know 
what it is, for I never heard it jar. He can- 
not be lost, for if he went to hell, the devil 
would not know what to do with him." 

But we must shape this many-sided in- 
quiry to a close. 

One other aspect of this Truth demands 
a passing notice before we close. Till now 
we have discussed the survival of the fittest 
only as it affects the individual. This is a 
small part of the truth. No law is of private 
interpretation. How calmly we, as individ- 
uals, appropriate the laws of God, focussing 
all in our own little world — as if they were 
only for ourselves ; as if they were not the 
parallel of latitude, of a larger universe, the 
revelation of the method of God's whole 
purposes and government. What is each 
man but one little thread in the loom of 
God ? The great wheels revolve, the shuttle 
flies, not for the thread but for the web; 
not for the web alone, but for the pattern 
on the web ; not for the pattern on the web, 
but for One, the Designer, who makes loom 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 113 

and web and pattern for Himself. To know 
why the loom is there, and why the shuttle 
moves, and why the threads are in this place 
or in that, or why they are there at all, we 
must look beyond ourselves, discover if we 
may the hidden Workman's purpose, and 
see in the half-finished design the prophecy 
of some final harmony. 

Revelation is too prophetic of the End, 
and creation is too full of God and of His 
plans to leave man without a clue to the 
larger meanings of the natural laws. In the 
natural world the function of the law of the 
survival of the fittest is to produce fitness — 
to make a select world (a cosmos, beautiful, 
harmonious) perfect. So is it in the spirit- 
ual world. There its function will surely 
be to secure and guarantee the quality of 
the Kingdom of God. 

If it is necessary that there should be a 
heaven, it is necessary that it should be kept 
heavenly. This is that law which now and 
evermore keeps heaven pure. It has more 
than a personal application ; it is a chief 
factor in the great evolution, one of the 



114 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

main instruments by which nature passes 
on to these nobler and nobler developments 
in which all changes, forces, and movements 
in nature appear to be culminating. So far 
as science can read the secret will and pur- 
pose of creation, it is this, that Nature is 
gravitating with infinite patience and sure- 
ness towards perfection. 

The object of the Law of the Survival of 
the Fittest is to produce fitness. And this 
is the object of Judgment — to produce fit- 
ness here by the terror of its law hereafter, 
to separate the chaff from the wheat, yet 
not for the sake of punishing the chaff only 
for the sake of preserving the wheat. This 
is the great law whose secret operations 
tend to make a select world. It is the 
guarantee of the quality of the Kingdom 
of God. 

Even now, in some poor way, we seem to 
see how God proceeds to secure His end. 
Our little world has had its own life-history. 
In the life-history of this one world we can 
dimly make out, not only the direction, but 
the method of progress, for every feature in 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 115 

its marvellous evolution is a further vision 
of things to come. Look into this past for 
a moment, observe God's way of producing 
earth from chaos, and say whether no clue 
lies here to that further evolution of heaven 
from earth. 



The Third 
Kingdom 



The Third Kingdom 

[The introductory page of the MS., which is lost, doubt- 
less contained a reference to a division into Inorganic or 
First Kingdom, Organic or Second, and Spiritual or Third.] 

I MAY be permitted to summarise briefly 
the teaching of the Sacred Books on 
the central subject of the Kingdom of God, 
and to point it, as occasion may offer, with 
reference to the present inquiry. 

The Kingdom of God the Central Idea of the 
Old and New Testaments 

That God was preparing out of the 
Second Kingdom a people for Himself is the 
most prominent fact of ancient history. 
For centuries the children of Israel were so 
impressed with this belief that they dared 
not, like other nations, permit themselves 
even to own an earthly king. With Jehovah 



120 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

to defend their case, with the King of kings 
to define and carry out their cause, genera- 
tion after generation held out against the 
temptation to create a human monarchy, and 
handed down unsoiled to the late age of the 
Captivity their theocratic faith. " The dom- 
inating thought of the Old Testament" to 
quote the words of Keim, " is that of the 
Kingdom of God upon earth. God is the 
God, the Lord, the King of the whole earth ; 
but from among all the nations He has 
chosen Israel to be His peculiar possession, 
His servants, His people, His first-born, 
His priestly kingdom. God is Israel's King, 
and rules as King. God fulfils His regal 
office by spiritually and physically bringing 
the nation into existence; by protecting, 
regulating, and guiding it with His blessings 
and His chastisements. He does all this, 
sometimes by His immediate presence, and 
sometimes through the agency of His 
inspired organs — lawgivers and generals, 
priests and prophets, and finally kings, who, 
in fact, are only viceroys. This kingdom 
has, however, its limits; the nations without 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 121 

do not obey, they make attacks upon the 
people of God, and the people of God 
sin against themselves and against their 
King." 1 

How a thousand years before the birth of 
Christ the longing rose for the Kingdom of 
God in a more perfect form, for a Kingdom 
that should conquer and rule the nations and 
establish righteousness and peace on earth ; 
how, fostered by the startling assurances of 
Daniel, the desire was kept alive through 
ages of oppression, and burned only the 
more clearly after prolonged disappointment ; 
how centuries after the voice of prophecy 
was silent in their land, when the Forerunner 
raised his standard in the wilderness, the old 
hope, deeper still in their hearts than any 
thought of God or man, uttered itself again 
in an almost national response to the Bap- 
tist's message — these points have but to be 
named to convince us of the thrilling reality 
of the Kingdom of God to the ancient Jew- 
ish Church, 

To point out the development of the con- 

1 Keim's " Jesus of Nazara," vol. iii. p. 43. 



122 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

ception as we come down to New Testa- 
ment times is all but superfluous. At the 
double risk of appearing to the world as an 
imitator of John, and to the Roman as 
sharing with the Baptist the responsibilities 
of political revolution, Jesus accepted the 
watchword of the hour and deliberately- 
announced Himself as the King of the 
promised Kingdom. How He gathered 
about Him the first few subjects, and in the 
face of laughter and blasphemy assumed the 
Sovereignty of the miniature State, framing 
a Constitution for it as far-reaching and pro- 
found as if it were already a great nation, is 
a plain fact of history. And as one follows 
His life throughout, it is patent to the most 
casual reader of the Gospel narratives that 
His one idea was to found on earth the 
Kingdom of Heaven. In Matthew alone 
the expressions " Kingdom of Heaven " and 
" Kingdom of God " occur forty-five times ; 
and generally the theme seems never to have 
been absent for a single hour from the 
thoughts of Jesus during His earthly min- 
istry. " In the contemplation of the doctrine 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 123 

of the Lord," says Van Oosterzee, " accord- 
ing to the Synoptics, we must proceed from 
the foundation-thought by which, above all 
others, it is ruled. It is that of the Kingdom 
of God." So Reuss, " L'idee fondamentale 
qui se reproduit a chaque instant dans l'en- 
seignement de Jesus, est celle du royaume 
de Dieu." 1 

Were an evolutionist asked to formulate 
the fundamental idea of nature, he would 
reply, in the light of all modern philosophy 
and science, The Idea of the Kingdom. All 
nature, he would say, is gravitating towards 
a nobler order of things. The vision of the 
past presents man with a grand and har- 
monious picture of the Ascent of Life, 
Kingdom is seen to be rising above kingdom. 
And yet withal the apex of the pyramid is 
still concealed. The perfect is not yet come. 
The whole creation groaneth and travaileth, 
waiting for the redemption of the creature. 
Scarce less audible is the prophecy of nature 

1 See further Hausrath, " New Testament Times," vol. 
ii. ; Keim, " Jesus of Nazara," vol. iii. ; also Neander, Hess, 
and especially the earlier chapters of " Ecce Homo." 



124 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

than the voice of Old Testament Scripture 
as to the coming of the world's Redeemer. 
And Science, like the Forerunner of the 
Messiah, has prepared the way of the Lord. 

The Object of the Third Kingdom 

What is the ultimate purpose of God in 
the further evolution of man can only be 
dimly discerned. With words, it is true, we 
can fill in logically the framework of the 
future ; but to the imagination, beyond a cer- 
tain point, these words become colourless 
symbols of a reality which man in this life 
can never grasp. Still it is not denied us to 
see a little way into the Third Kingdom, and 
we may attempt at least a provisional answer 
to this question. What does the Kingdom 
of God propose to do for mankind ? 

The form of the question which chiefly in- 
terests us in the present inquiry is, Does the 
Kingdom of God propose to do anything 
abnormal, extravagant, or unintelligible ? 
Is it a new and unrelated effect that is to 
be wrought on the subjects of this Kingdom, 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 125 

or is it something still consistently in line 
with continuity ? Certainly if it could be 
shown that the aim of the Third Kingdom 
was in harmony with all that has gone be- 
fore, it would go a long way to remove any 
prejudice that may exist against it on the 
ground of what men call its unnaturalness 
and " other- worldliness." 

The simplest method of testing the natu- 
ralness of the object of the Third Kingdom 
is to refer to the aim of the Second. What 
is it that serious men propose to themselves 
as the object of life? Is there not some- 
thing that all have willed to achieve — a 
summum bonum — a chief end of man ? 
These, for ages, have been the questions 
of philosophy. The greatest and wisest 
among mankind have studied this problem. 
And it would be idle to deny that their 
labours have achieved at least a general 
result. Without referring to any of the 
specific plans of life proposed by different 
schools, it will sufficiently summarise the 
conclusion of all to say that the highest 
aims of mankind are connected with the 



126 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

moral development of the race. Whatever 
methods various philosophies have pointed 
out in order to attain this end, and what- 
ever shades of difference exist as to the end 
itself, there is no debate as to this general 
result. There is no question likewise, and 
this is an important consideration, that the 
ideal of philosophy has never yet been 
reached. With greater or less hope some 
philosophic schools still expect a future suc- 
cess to justify the principles they teach ; 
others found wanting after fair trial have 
already withdrawn from the field. Still a 
unanimous consensus among men that the 
highest development of the race is the 
summum bonum is a fact too significant to 
be ignored. And any new applicant for 
favour might be expected beforehand to 
enter the field with this same general aim 
in spite of the warnings of those who have 
failed. Any other aim would be unnatural. 
Now as a matter of fact the aim of Chris-' 
tianity, in its general direction, is the aim 
of all philosophy. Christianity fell naturally 
into the stream of evolution which was 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 127 

carrying the world through kingdom after 
kingdom to a high and perfect development. 
Its idea of development was immeasurably 
loftier than that of philosophy, and the 
means for carrying out the process were 
altogether different ; but the goal in either 
case, though not the same, lay in the same 
general line. I have defined the aim of 
philosophy to be the moral development of 
the race. When it is said, however, that 
this is also the aim of Christianity we must 
attach a higher significance to the term 
moral. Morality is a word of the Second 
Kingdom. In the Third we look for its 
evolution. We shall still recognise the old 
quality, but it will really exist in a form so 
greatly developed that we may be justified 
in substituting for morality the word spirit- 
uality. At the same time it must again be 
repeated that the development of the spirit- 
ual from the natural man is not a case of 
simple evolution. The natural character 
does not simply grow better and better until 
a pitch of excellence is reached such as 
finally deserves the distinguishing name of 



128 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

spirituality. Spirituality and morality differ 
qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The 
natural development can never pass the bar- 
rier separating the Second from the Third 
Kingdom. The transition is secured, just as 
in the case of atoms passing from the First 
to the Second Kingdom, by means of some- 
thing not inherent in the lower Kingdom 
but communicated ab extra. 

But while giving the fullest prominence to 
this cardinal fact that the spiritual is not a 
mere natural development of the natural, it 
is no less necessary to point out, although at 
first sight it seems a paradox, that the spirit- 
ual character is still a development of the 
natural. The first object of the Third King- 
dom cannot, without misconception, be said 
to be the creating merely of a spiritual char- 
acter. Its first work is to make what would 
be called a perfect natural character. It does 
not leave the Second Kingdom in a raw, un- 
finished state, and, regardless of the natural 
man, proceed to start afresh with a new set 
of organisms developing under a new regime. 
Its first business is to complete the old. It 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 129 

takes up a human life at the point where the 
natural world has left it and carries it on to 
perfection. There is, it is true, a new crea- 
ture born within the natural man. And in 
this sense there is a new creation and a new 
departure. But the first work of the new 
nature is to operate on the old and do for it 
what it failed to do for itself. Thus the aim 
of the spiritual Kingdom in the first instance 
is to perfect the natural. The first object of 
Christianity is to make men. So far from 
being a dehumanising process, it alone cre- 
ates the true humanity. For the Third 
Kingdom alone possesses the true ideal, 
and alone contains the energies effectually 
to overpower those forces of sin which pre- 
vent men from ever becoming men. 

I purposely refrain from making more 
than the most meagre allusion to the aims of 
the spiritual world, for the subject does not 
come directly within the biological province. 
Words at all times fail, however, to express 
the magnificence of the scheme of Christian- 
ity. For the past its provision is so com- 
plete, for the present so wonderful, for the 

9 



130 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

future so glorious that the more one exer- 
cises his mind upon the religion of Jesus 
Christ the more is he impressed with its 
wisdom, magnificence, and thorough practi- 
cal adaptation to every need and wish of 
man. The whole conception of the Re- 
demption of the world, the amazing series of 
events projected in order to it, the possibility 
opened to man of a pure life and a disinter- 
ested deed, the promise of having all the 
haunting problems of life and time, all the 
souls deep difficulties concerning the uni- 
verse and the eternal finally solved — these 
alone mark out the Third Kingdom as a 
creation of the Most High. Nothing could 
be more exquisite than the programme of 
Christianity penned by Isaiah centuries be- 
fore the Founder of the Kingdom was born 
in Bethlehem. One would come 
" To preach good tidings to the meek ; 

To bind up the broken-hearted ; 

To proclaim liberty to the captives ; 

To comfort all that mourn ; 

To give unto them beauty for ashes, 

The oil of joy for mourning, 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 131 

The garment of praise for the spirit of 
heaviness ; 

That they might be called trees of righte- 
ousness, the p larding of the Lord, 

That He might be glorified." * 

Side by side with these words let him who 
would rate the claims of the Third Kingdom 
on his acceptance — unobtrusive claims which 
have always depended most on a mute appeal 
to their inherent dignity and grace — read 
the Sermon on the Mount. And if he would 
understand the aspirations of the Kingdom 
he will find the seven deepest thoughts of his 
own heart at its purest moments reflected in 
the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer. 

If that programme is not a satire on the 
gospels of humanity, if these beatitudes are 
not a fiction, if the Lord's Prayer is not the 
expression of a need that is rarely felt and 
never gratified, they have a claim upon man- 
kind more vitally real than anything else in 
the world. If there be a Kingdom of God, 
that programme, that Sermon and that Prayer 
are worthy of it. And if they be but a dream, 

1 Isaiah lxi. 1-3. 



132 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

I know not how we shall account for such a 
dream. 

While the design of the Third Kingdom 
coincides somewhat with the purpose of 
Moral Philosophy, its apparatus and methods 
are widely different. And they are different 
mainly in respect of two things already men- 
tioned. Christianity provides an ideal which 
is the highest possible, and equips the sub- 
jects of the Kingdom with powers in every 
way adequate to realise that ideah The 
problems connected with the ideal will be 
referred to again, but the question of the 
powers of the spiritual Kingdom may now 
be dealt with under a separate head. 

The Powers of the Third Kingdom 

The fundamental difference between the 
Second and Third Kingdoms consists in 
what, for want of a better name, may be 
called their Energies. The difference of 
phenomena entirely depends on this — the 
difference, for example, between morality 
and spirituality. Philosophy may easily 
borrow the ideal from Christianity ; to some 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 133 

extent it may attempt to introduce its 
motive, but it utterly breaks down in the 
practical application. And it fails for want 
of the one thing which finally differentiates 
the Third Kingdom from the Second — 
Life. Discussing Christianity on the philo- 
sophical plane in a chapter of singular 
insight and beauty, Ecce Homo, while insist- 
ing upon the difference between Christian- 
ity and Moral Philosophy, fails withal, as it 
seems to me, to recognise the infinite and 
radical distinction between them, owing to 
a disregard of this unique quality of Life. 
" Philosophers had drawn their pupils from 
the elite of humanity ; but Christ finds His 
material among the worst and meanest, for 
He does not propose merely to make the 
good better, but the bad good. And what 
is His machinery? He says the first step 
towards good dispositions is for a man to 
form a strong personal attachment. Let 
him first be drawn out of himself. Next, 
let the object of that attachment be a person 
of striking and conspicuous goodness. To 
worship such a person will be the best exer- 



134 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

cise in virtue that he can have. Let him 
vow obedience in life and death to such a 
person; let him mix and live with others 
who have made the same vow. He will 
have ever before his eyes an ideal of what 
he may himself become. His heart will be 
stirred by new feelings, a new world will 
be gradually revealed to him, and, more than 
this, a new self within his old self will make 
its presence felt, and a change will pass over 
him which he will feel it most appropriate 
to call a new birth." 1 The fatal objection 
to this scheme is that it begins at the wrong 
end. Certain changes pass over a man's 
character; he forms a personal attachment, 
worships his ideal, learns obedience, and all 
this he will " feel it most appropriate " to 
call a new birth. Why not begin with the 
new birth ? Why be guilty, even in appear- 
ance, of the scientific heresy of making Life 
the result of organisation instead of the 
cause of it? The language used certainly 
lends itself at least to the supposition that 
the expression " new birth " is merely a 

1 " Ecce Homo," fourteenth edition, p. 92. 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 135 

metaphor — an " appropriate " term for the 
act after the result has appeared. And the 
criticism of Ecce Homo on Christianity in 
this respect is not exceptional, but repre- 
sentative. The Kingdom of Heaven is 
simply the " Society of Jesus," or " a religi- 
ous-moral institution" (Van Oosterzee), or 
"a filial relation to God" (Hausrath). 

Now, the Kingdom of God is all this, but 
it is also a great deal more. From the phil- 
osophical standpoint no definitions, probably, 
could be more exact ; none other even are 
possible. But there has been a universal 
failure to regard the whole subject, in the 
first instance, as a question of Biology. 
Even those theologies which have recognised 
most clearly the special factor of Life in 
Christianity have still felt themselves insen- 
sibly drawn to discuss the question ultimately 
in terms of philosophy. That it is suscept- 
ible of philosophic treatment is abundantly 
plain; but it cannot with too much em- 
phasis be pointed out that, alike from the 
analogies of nature and from the explicit 
declarations of its Founder, the Third King- 



136 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

dom must be treated primarily as a biological 
question. Christ affirmed that His first 
object in coming to men was to give them 
Life — more abundant Life. And that He 
meant literal Life, literal spiritual Life, is 
clear from the whole course of His teaching 
and acting. To impose a metaphorical mean- 
ing on the commonest word of the New 
Testament is to violate every canon of in- 
terpretation, and at the same time to charge 
the greatest of Teachers with persistently 
mystifying His hearers by an unusual use of 
so exact a vehicle for expressing definite 
thought as the Greek language, on the most 
momentous subject of which He ever spoke 
— a subject, indeed, of life or death to all 
whom He addressed. It is a canon of inter- 
pretation, says Alford, that " a figurative 
sense of words is never admissible except 
when required by the context." The con- 
text in most cases is not only directly un- 
favourable to the figurative meaning, but in 
innumerable cases Life is broadly contrasted 
with Death. In others, as in the discourse 
with Nicodemus, the language used makes it 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 137 

inconceivable that there, at least, the sym- 
bolical meaning is implied. " Ye must be 
born again," said Jesus to the Rabbi. And 
that the words were taken literally is appar- 
ent from the answer : " How can a man be 
born when he is old ? Can he enter a second 
time into his mother's womb and be born ? " 
While undeceiving His pupil as to the ac- 
ceptance of the term Life in its natural 
organic sense, Christ continues to insist 
withal that it is nevertheless Life — a deeper 
and spiritual Life, a Life mysteriously entering 
into the soul as by a breath from God. " Ex- 
cept a man be born of water and of the Spirit, 
he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. . . . 
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and 
that which is born of the spirit is spirit" 1 

To pass from Christ's words to the teach- 
ing of the Apostles, we find that without 
exception they have accepted the term in its 
simple, literal sense. Reuss defines the 
Apostolic belief, as is his wont, with rigid im- 
partiality when he discovers in the Apostles' 
conception of Life, first, " the idea of a real 

1 John iii. 



138 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

existence, an existence such as is proper to 
God and to the Word ; an imperishable ex- 
istence — that is to say, not subject to the 
vicissitudes and imperfections of the finite 
world. This primary idea is repeatedly ex- 
pressed, at least in a negative form ; it leads 
to a doctrine of immortality, or, to speak 
more correctly, of life, far surpassing any that 
had been expressed in the formulas of the 
current philosophy or theology, and resting 
upon premises and conceptions altogether 
different. In fact, it can dispense both with 
the philosophical thesis of the immateriality 
or indestructibility of the human soul, and 
with the theological thesis of a miraculous 
corporeal reconstruction of our person : 
theses, the first of which is altogether foreign 
to the religion of the Bible, and the second 
absolutely opposed to reason." Second, " the 
idea of life, as it is conceived in this system, 
implies the idea of a power, an operation, a 
communication, since this life no longer re- 
mains, so to speak, latent or passive in God 
and in the Word, but through them reaches 
the believer. It is not a neutral, somnolent 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 139 

thing; it is not a plant without fruit; it is a 
germ which is to find fullest development." 1 
The sum of New Testament doctrine is 
that there is an immediate action of the 
Spirit of God on the souls of men. In the 
New Testament alone the Spirit is referred 
to nearly three hundred times. And the 
one word with which He is constantly asso- 
ciated is Power. If we are asked to define 
more clearly what is meant by this Power 
we hand over the difficulty to science. When 
science can define Life and Force we may 
hope for further clearness on the nature and 
action of the Spiritual Powers. At the same 
time we are forewarned that with our present 
faculties we can never pass far beyond the 
threshold of these hidden things. Their 
very power of evading the senses is the mys- 
terious token of their spirituality. It is the 
test of the Spirit that thou canst not tell 
whence it cometh or whither it goeth. If we 
could tell, if we could trace it naturally to its 
source, if we could account for its operations 

1 Reuss, " History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic 
Age," vol. ii. p. 496. 



140 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

on ordinary principles, if we could define re- 
generation as the effect of moral persuasion, 
we should be dealing not with the Unknown 
but with the Known. It is from the analy- 
sis of natural religion, where the elements 
can all be rationally accounted for, that men 
derive their chief argument against the 
supernatural. But in analysing spirituality 
the effort to detect the Living Spirit is as 
idle as to subject protoplasm to microscopic 
examination in the hope of discovering Life. 
When the Spiritual Life is discovered in the 
laboratory it will be time to give it up alto- 
gether. It may then say, as Socrates of his 
soul, "You can bury me — if you can catch 
me." 

While the Powers of the Third Kingdom 
evade analysis their Energy is not less real. 
The activities of the Third Person of the 
Trinity have always been described as dy- 
namical. The Spirit is the executive of the 
Godhead, carrying out the sovereign Will by 
operations as irresistible as they are subtle. 
To this omnipotent agency are to be referred 
ultimately all changes which take place with- 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 141 

in the Kingdom of God on earth. This is 
the Source of Energy for the Third King- 
dom. And long before the days of Dy- 
namics, when the energies of the Second 
Kingdom were less understood than now are 
those of the Third, the schoolmen were wont 
to express their conception of the Divine 
Activity in Nature and in Grace by the 
actual use of the word physical} Owen also 
in his classical work on the Holy Spirit re- 
peatedly affirms the physical nature of the 
Spirit's operations, especially in the process 
of regeneration : " There is a real physical 
work, whereby He infuseth a gracious prin- 
ciple of spiritual life into all that are effec- 

1 Thus Turret in speaking of the gratia efficacis motto : 
" Non est simpliciter physica, quia agitur de facultate morali 
quae congruenter naturae suae moveri debet ; nee simpliciter 
ethica, quasi Deus objective solum ageret, et leni suasione 
uteretur, quod pertendebant Pelagiani. Sed supernaturalis 
est et divina, quae transcendit omnia haec genera. Interim 
aliquid de ethico et physica participate quia et potenter et 
suaviter, grate et invicte, operatur Spiritus ad nostri con- 
versionem. Ad modum physicum pertinet, quod Deus 
Spiritu suo nos creat, regenerat, cor carneum dat, et effi- 
cienter habitus supernaturales fidei et charitatis nobis infundit. 
Ad moralem quod verbo docet, inclinat, suadet et rationibus 
variis tanquam vinculis amoris ad se trahit." 



142 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

tually converted and really regenerated, and 
without which there is no deliverance from 
the state of sin and death. " 

Without agitating the time-honoured ques- 
tions as to whether this Spiritual Power is 
mediate or immediate, whether it is resistible 
or irresistible, whether Spiritual Life is to 
be considered as part of it, or as the whole, 
or as none of it; without raising problems 
suggested by current scientific thought — as 
to whether there are any analogies between 
these and the ordinary energies of nature ; 
whether, for instance, they are capable of 
Transformation, Conservation, or Dissipa- 
tion- — we may rather go on to inquire for 
the evidence of the spiritual operations them- 
selves and for the results which ought to 
have followed. It will assist us, however, in 
understanding the evidence, as well as in 
defining the kind of result to be looked for, 
if we take one more backward glance at the 
two earlier Kingdoms. Suppose we take 
our stand for a moment on the confines of 
the Inorganic Kingdom. What order of 
phenomena will strike us first ? Shall we 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 143 

see the Second Kingdom act on the First, 
and if so, in what particular way ? 

As we take our first survey of the Inor- 
ganic Kingdom we seem to be surrounded 
by the dead. Every Atom obeys the law of 
inertia, or yields to simple changes induced 
by polar, molecular, or other forces. But 
presently, into this dead world, an unknown 
Power descends, feels about, seizes certain 
Atoms, and manipulates them in unprece- 
dented ways. This mysterious Power is the 
Power of the Kingdom next in order above. 
To that Kingdom, indeed, the operations of 
Life, as facts of everyday occurrence, are 
not mysterious. But to the Atoms they are 
unintelligible and very wonderful. Here is 
one Atom raised from the dead. Here is 
another refusing to bend its will to the 
attraction of gravity. A third, subject to 
crystalline forces from the beginning, sud- 
denly defies them and takes its place as a 
part of the higher symmetry of a living 
organism. As their Fellow-Atoms observe 
these extraordinary changes, from time to 
time occurring around them, they have only 



144 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

one word which adequately describes them 
— they are Miracles. 

Taking our stand now on the confines of 
the Organic, shall we not be presented with 
the same strange spectacle ? Once more we 
are surrounded by the dead. Once more a 
Power descends out of another Kingdom — 
a Kingdom just in order above — and manip- 
ulates Organisms in unprecedented ways. 
Here is one Organism raised from the dead. 
Here is another refusing to bend its will to 
the attraction of sin. A third, subject to 
deforming forces from the beginning, sud- 
denly defies them, and assumes a high and 
noble spiritual symmetry. And as their 
Fellow-Organisms observe these changes, 
their word again is Miracle. 

This then, is what meets us first at the 
portals of the Third Kingdom — Miracle. 
We find an order of phenomena strange and 
inexplicable to the lower Kingdom, but as 
normal within its own sphere as are the opera- 
tions of Life in the Organic. As the powers 
of the Second Kingdom master the First, so 
the powers of the Third master the Second. 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 145 

But this is not what is usually called Miracle, 
Miracle is a much narrower thing — so very 
narrow a thing that up to this point we have 
scarcely even come in sight of it. To single 
out a few specific wonders authenticated by 
ancient documents, and to attach to them 
the epithet Miracle is a limitation so mon- 
strous and unwarranted that the protest 
against it cannot come too soon. 

The question of the miraculous is simply 
the general question of the Third Kingdom. 
To apply the word to certain acts of healing, 
to beneficent deeds of an abnormal charac- 
ter, or to deliverance from physical danger, 
want, or death, is to contemplate the reac- 
tions of the Spiritual Kingdom only on the 
lowest plane of the Organic and Inorganic 
Worlds. The outstanding miracles, on the 
contrary, are those effected on the moral 
and intellectual portions of the highest de- 
partment of the Organic Kingdom — namely, 
on the life and character of the Natural Man. 
The attestation of Christianity is the Chris- 
tian. Without taking this into account, the 
supernatural changes wrought on the lower 



10 



146 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

department are mere wizard- work. Miracle, 
from the standpoint of the Second King- 
dom, is not alone objectionable as pure 
prodigy, but it amounts to an absolute 
breach of Continuity. The sceptical defi- 
nitions of miracle from this standpoint are 
perfectly legitimate. Hume is loyal to 
nature when he affirms that " A miracle is 
a violation of the laws of nature ; and, as 
a firm and unalterable experience has estab- 
lished these laws, the proof against a miracle, 
from the very nature of the fact, is as entire 
as any argument from experience that can 
possibly be imagined." Deliberately choos- 
ing the standpoint of the Second Kingdom, 
and absolutely rejecting the Third, Hume 
had no alternative. In his experience of 
the laws of nature, no variation ever occurred 
in the usual course of antecedent and conse- 
quent. Thus the question of miracle comes 
to this — there is either delusion, fraud, or a 
Third Kingdom ; and if one rejects the last, 
his choice between the two former is imma- 
terial. 

If, on the other hand, one accepts the 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 147 

Third Kingdom, the miraculous becomes 
not only credible but necessary. The Third 
Kingdom would not be the Third Kingdom 
if it could not operate on the Kingdom 
beneath it in a way which to the Kingdoms 
below would seem miraculous. The Second 
Kingdom is the Second Kingdom because it 
can operate on the First in a way which to 
the First must seem miraculous. It is supe- 
rior to the First in virtue of the superiority 
of its powers and the corresponding complex- 
ity of its organisms. In precisely the same 
way the Third rises superior to the Second. 
It is of much consequence to notice that 
it is not alone the forms of organisms which 
are found evolving in nature, but the powers 
or energies. There is a dynamical as well 
as a statical evolution. The First Kingdom 
is equipped with a certain set of powers, or 
possibly with one central energy capable of 
assuming varied forms. The Second, while 
inheriting all this plenishing of the Inorganic 
Earth, brings upon the scene the new and 
commanding powers of Life. But the powers 
of Life, however derived, however directed, 



148 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

are still feeble. The Organic is not always 
master. And it is not until the Higher 
Evolution is attained that the complement 
appears. Then the dominion is complete; 
that which is perfect is come ; and both the 
First and Second Kingdoms are reigned over 
by the Third. Were there no domination 
of the Second by the Third, there had been 
no Third. And hence the naturalness of 
our Lord's appeal to miracle as the sign to 
the Second of the existence of the Third. 
If a plant wished to convince a mineral of 
the reality of the powers of the vegetable 
Kingdom — acting in the direction, let us 
say, of causing matter to rise in the air — 
during the plant's growth in defiance of 
gravity — it would naturally point to specific 
cases where these powers had been exercised. 
The effect in the first instance upon the 
mineral would be to tempt it to reject the 
fact as contrary to experience, but as the evi- 
dence accumulated both in quantity and 
quality the doubt must gradually dissolve. 
A mineral, subject no longer to the in- 
organic forces which otherwise reign su- 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 149 

preme throughout the Kingdom, bearing 
practical testimony to the reality and supe- 
riority of extra-inorganic powers, would 
certainly be a phenomenon of transcendent 
scientific significance. Attention would be 
gradually drawn to the possibility of the ex- 
istence of a higher world, and as the facts 
were seen to be repeated, and as from differ- 
ent quarters evidence accumulated, all doubt 
upon the subject must gradually dissolve. 
But if, instead of fixing attention upon an 
isolated case here and there, one runs his 
eye over the boundary line dividing the In- 
organic from the Organic, and finds the 
whole frontier abounding in similar activities, 
like the seaward margin of a coral reef 
fringed with the living polypes, he receives 
a new impression of their character and 
relations. He sees that these marvellous 
reactions are at that point no longer the 
exception but the rule. Miracle, in short, is 
the normal frontier phenomenon. Along the 
line of junction, again, between the Natural 
and the Spiritual a similar set of activities 
are carrying on their ceaseless work. Con- 



ISO THE THIRD KINGDOM 

templated from the bottom of the Second 
Kingdom, where on an isolated group here 
and there these activities are operating on 
grosser material, the phenomena are excep- 
tional, unintelligible, and miraculous. But on 
the frontier they are the normal actions 
of the Third Kingdom on the Second, 
demanded by Continuity, justified in the 
magnitude and gathering potency of their 
operations by Evolution and susceptible of 
the same kind of proof. 

That they are so little observed in the 
higher reaches is due to a peculiar law of 
their being. The Kingdom cometh without 
observation. But this is not true alone for 
the Kingdom of God. With infinite gentle- 
ness the Second Kingdom throws over the 
First its mysterious spell. With infinite 
delicacy its tentacles feel among the all but 
invisible atoms and build them up into higher 
forms, by unperceived and silent processes 
carrying on their growth. All the forces of 
the Inorganic world even are secret, silent 
forces. Gravity, the most ponderous of all, 
came down the ages with a step so noiseless 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 151 

that the world was old before an ear was 
quick enough to detect its footfall. And the 
Spiritual forces which carry on the processes 
to the further stage, re-creating the visible, 
acting through more and more attenuated 
forms of matter, become themselves more 
ethereal, the law in fact being that the various 
forces decrease in grossness as they increase 
in power. 

But in the first days of Christianity the 
invisibility of its forces formed a drawback 
to its development. If not essential, it was 
at least advisable that the outside world 
should become at once aware of its preten- 
sions. And if the secret operations of the 
Spirit in regenerating men were then insuffi- 
cient to attract attention, it became necessary 
for the manifestation to descend to what 
some might call a lower plane. The Spirit- 
ual, having power over the whole range of 
the Organic and Inorganic, might fitly exert 
an influence in a region where the miracle 
might be palpable, startling and unmistak- 
able. It might be urged indeed that Virtue 
could not but go out of Jesus at whatever 



152 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

point He touched life ; but at the same time 
this lower miracle was not due to the inad- 
vertent overflow of a full vessel, but designed 
to strike men who could not rise to the per- 
ception of loftier manifestations. The num- 
ber of occasions on which He made this 
concession, always of course with the higher 
purpose directly in view and apparent in 
the immediate result, was probably very 
much larger than the limited information we 
possess might lead us to suspect. The 
Evangelists hint that these interpolations of 
the Higher Powers, these suspensions of the 
ordinary course of nature in obedience to a 
higher law, occurred with great frequency. 
And although it is proper to notice the 
striking and suggestive fact of the extreme 
conservation of this power in the life-work of 
Jesus, it is equally necessary to bear in mind 
that He continually did works which no 
other man did, and periodically appealed to 
these as a ground why the members of the 
Natural Kingdom should accept the Spiritual. 
But there could be no greater mistake than 
to perpetuate the appeal to this rudimentary 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 153 

form of miracle as the continued attestation 
of Christianity. If miracle ceased with the 
first century, our faith, to a large extent, 
ceases with it, or at least most seriously suf- 
fers. What we have to point to now for the 
credentials of Christianity is not a first series 
of miracles but the series itself — the series 
which extends down to the present hour. 
To ignore this is to put ourselves in a 
position where belief has everything against 
it, human testimony notwithstanding. But if 
we begin with the phenomena which we see 
around us, or can see if we w r ill, and argue 
backwards, step by step, coming slowly down 
to the time when the Miracle Himself was 
upon the stage, we reach a point where signs 
and wonders really appear to us as the in- 
evitable. The denial of miracles accordingly, 
in the ordinary sense, is not the evidence of 
superior wisdom, but mainly of defective 
observation. Unless gravity had continued 
to act during the last two centuries we should, 
perhaps, have been justified in saying that 
Newton was mistaken when he saw the apple 
fall to the ground. How could such a thing 



154 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

happen ? Is Newton to contradict " the uni- 
versal experience of mankind"? Is his 
testimony to be accepted rather than that of 
Herschel or Faraday, who never saw such a 
thing happen ? Is not such a violation of 
the laws of nature altogether incredible and 
inconceivable, even although the whole of 
Woolsthorpe were looking over the orchard 
wall when the apple fell ? 

Now, if Christianity ceased to act with the 
first century, I do not see that we can argue 
for the miraculous. Unless we include the 
Third Kingdom in our conception a miracle 
is certainly a violation of the laws of nature. 
And if the Third Kingdom has passed away 
miracles may be interesting, but their occu- 
pation is gone — there is nothing for them 
to attest to me. On the other hand if the 
Powers of the Third Kingdom are working 
around me now I am independent of them. 
I have the superior credential of the " greater 
works " which Christ's disciples were to do in 
His name. 

But I have said the denial of miracles is 
due mainly to defective observation — mainly 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 155 

however, not wholly. The members of the 
Third Kingdom have something to answer 
for themselves here. They have failed to 
provide due materials for observation. 
Energy may be potential as well as kinetic. 
Were a visitant from a distant planet who 
had read " The Correlation of the Physical 
Forces " or Ganot's " Physics " to land on the 
coast of Labrador and demand of the 
Esquimaux to be shown the energies of 
electricity or the powers of steam, his credu- 
lity in his authorities would certainly be 
shaken. And even if he were informed by a 
passing Nordenskiold that many of the 
physical forces were available at Labrador, 
only the people had never utilised them, his 
bewilderment would not be lessened. Those 
who read the Christian's Book hear in like 
manner of faith to remove mountains, of 
love stronger than death, of limitless powers 
to be had for the asking, of all the fulness 
of the Godhead placed at man's disposal. 
And when they turn to those who know this 
Book, who profess to believe it, who con- 
tribute themselves to the literature of the 



156 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

Third Kingdom expanding and enforcing its 
ideas, and almost forcing them on men's at- 
tention, what do they see ? Is. it any satis- 
faction that a courteous Nordenskiold assures 
them that these forces are there withal, only 
the members of this frigid province at the 
moment do not happen to employ them ? 
For does not the critic see multitudes of in- 
dividuals met every week for the ostensible 
purpose of receiving these powers, down on 
their knees by the thousand crying for them 
to come ? What is he to make of it ? Is he 
dreaming or they ? Or does the Kingdom 
come — but without observation ? No; the 
Kingdom does not come. On the large scale 
it does not come. The splendid machinery 
of Christianity is standing still. The Church 
is paralysed. When the Second Kingdom 
asks the Third for its credentials it remains 
silent. It has something to show in the 
past ; it points sadly to the early centuries. 
But for the present nothing stirs; it is all as 
frozen as Labrador. 

So men tell us the spiritual energies are a 
myth — which is as inconclusive as the state- 



THE THIRD KINGDOM 157 

ment that the physical forces are myths 
where they are not utilised. The scepticism 
of the age nevertheless lies at the door of the 
Church. That there are individuals, and 
here and there churches, witnessing to the 
powers of the Third Kingdom is not to be 
gainsaid. No man who really desires to 
satisfy himself of the reality of the Spiritual 
World will seek in vain for a demonstration 
of the Spirit and of Power. But the appeal 
is not going forth to all the earth and arrest- 
ing men by a testimony triumphant and irre- 
sistible. The Power that operated at Pente- 
cost is no longer a mighty and awakening 
force. And even the ethical light which the 
subjects of the Third Kingdom were admon- 
ished to " let shine among men " is all but 
too dim to see. 

Now, whatever may be the state of 
matters at present within the Visible Church 
of the Third Kingdom, let us not blind our- 
selves to the unspeakably important fact that 
the Spiritual World contains forms of energy 
infinitely more powerful than those of the 
First and Second. It has never been suffi- 



158 THE THIRD KINGDOM 

ciently realised how much greater they are 
— how much greater they must be, even 
from analogy. One might almost speak of 
an Evolution of Energy going on as we rise 
from higher to higher Kingdoms. By this, 
of course, is not meant that the higher 
energy is in any sense evolved from the 
lower, but that the potency — whatever may 
be the source of the increment — is found 
gradually becoming stronger and stronger. 
As a matter of fact, while the energy within 
each Kingdom is constant, the organic 
powers are greater than the inorganic, the 
Spiritual than either. And the one thing 
requisite at once for the attestation of the 
Third Kingdom and the further evolution of 
the Second is that the subjects of the former 
should give heed once more to the offer of 
its King and Founder, " If ye, being evil, 
know how to give good gifts to your chil- 
dren, much more will your heavenly Father 
give the Holy Spirit to them that ask it." 



The Problem 
of Foreign 
Missions 



Address delivered at the opening 
of the session in the Free Church 
College, Glasgow, in November, 
1890. 



The Problem of 
Foreign Missions 

IT has for a long time seemed to me that 
missionary facts, and the missionary 
problem generally, are susceptible of more 
special — may I say more scientific? — treat- 
ment than they usually receive ; and the 
large size of the field which it has fallen to 
me to see is favourable to that methodical 
survey of the whole which is denied even 
to the missionary, for he represents but a 
single field. 

There are two ways in which men who 
offer their lives to their fellow-men may 
regard the world. They mean the same 
thing in the end, but you will not misunder- 
stand me if I express the apparent distinc- 
tion in the boldest terms. The first view 
is that the world is lost and must be saved ; 

ii 



162 THE PROBLEM OF 

the second, that the world is sunken and 
must be raised. According to the first, 
the peoples of the world are looked upon 
as souls — souls to be redeemed ; the second 
thinks of them rather as men — men to be 
perfected; or as nations — nations to be 
made righteous. The first deals with a 
sinner's status in the sight of God, the 
second with his character in the sight of 
men. The first preaches mainly justifica- 
tion ; the second mainly regeneration. The 
first is the standpoint of the popular evan- 
gelism ; the second is the view of evolution. 
The danger of the first is to save the souls 
of men and there leave them ; the danger 
of the second is to ignore the soul alto- 
gether. As I shall speak now from the 
last standpoint, I point out its danger at 
once, and meet it by adding to its watch- 
word, evolution, the qualifying term, Chris- 
tian. This alone takes account of the whole 
nature of man, of sin and guilt, of the future 
and of the past, and recognises the Christian 
facts and forces as alone adequate to deal 
with them. The advantage of speaking of 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 163 

" the Christian evolution of the world," 
instead of, or, at least, as a change from, 
" the evangelisation of the world," will ap- 
pear as we go on. By making temporary- 
use of the one standpoint, I do not exclude 
the other ; and if I ignore it from this point 
onward, it is not because it is not legitimate, 
but simply because it is not the subject. 

Nothing ought to be kept more persist- 
ently before the mind of those who are 
open to serve the world as missionaries 
than the great complexity of the missionary 
problem ; and nothing more strikes one 
who goes round the world than the amazing 
variety of work required and the almost 
radical differences among the various mis- 
sion fields. In the popular conception the 
peoples of the world are roughly divided 
into black and white, or Christian and 
heathen, and the man who designates him- 
self for the mission field makes a general 
choice, taking the first opening that comes 
and considering but little in his decision 
that there are many shades of black, and 
innumerable kinds of heathen. But it is 



164 THE PROBLEM OF 

just as absurd for a man to choose in general 
terms " the foreign field " and go abroad 
to rescue heathen, as for a planter to go 
anywhere abroad in the hope of sowing 
general seed and producing general coffee. 
The planter soon finds out that there are 
many soils in the world, some suited to one 
crop and some to another; that seed must 
be put in for each particular crop in one 
way and not in another; that he requires 
particular implements in each case and not 
any implements, and that the time between 
sowing and reaping, and even between sow- 
ing and sprouting, is an always appreciable 
and very varying interval. The mission 
field has like distinctions. Some crops it 
is mere waste of time to try to plant in one 
place ; the specialist's business is to find out 
what will grow there. Some crops will not 
and cannot come up in one year, or in ten 
years, or even in fifty years ; it is the special- 
ist's business to study scientifically the pos- 
sibilities of growth, the limitations of growth, 
and the impossibilities of growth. It is 
irrational also for the missionary to carry 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 165 

the same message, or rather the same form 
of message, to every land, or to think that 
the thought which told to-day will tell to- 
morrow; he must rotate his crops as God 
through the centuries rotates the social soil 
on which they are to grow. To every land 
he must take, not the general list of agri- 
cultural implements furnished by his college, 
but one or two of special make which possi- 
bly his college has never heard of. Above 
all, when he reaches his field, his duty is to 
find out what God has grown there already, 
for there is no field in the world where the 
Great Husbandman has not sown something. 
Instead of uprooting his Makers work and 
clearing the field of all the plants that found 
no place in his small European herbarium, 
he will rather water the growths already 
there and continue the work at the point 
where the Spirit of God is already moving. 
A hasty critic, when these sentences were 
spoken, construed them into a plea for 
building up Christianity upon heathenism. 
The words are " what God has sown there," 
and " where the Spirit of God is already 



166 THE PROBLEM OF 

moving." The missionary problem, in 
short, so far from being a mere saving of 
promiscuous souls with a few well-worn 
appliances, is a most complex question of 
Social Evolution. 

Let me illustrate the necessity of further 
specialisation in regard to missions by refer- 
ence to the three or four very different fields 
which I have just visited. As examples of 
what might be called a scientific classifica- 
tion of missions, one could scarcely pick 
any more typical than Australia, the South 
Sea Islands, China, and Japan. I include 
Australia among mission fields, and I might 
with it include both British Columbia and 
Manitoba, because none of these countries 
can provide as yet for its own evangelisation. 

I. Australia. The missionary problem, 
or the mission churches problem, in these 
colonies is to deal with a civilised people 
undergoing abnormally rapid development. 
Australia is a case of prodigiously active 
growth in a few directions under most favour- 
able natural conditions for nation-making. 
It is what a biologist would call an organic 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 167 

mass of the highest possible mobility, of al- 
most perilous sensitiveness to prevailing im- 
pressions, with feeble safeguards to conserve 
its solid gains, and few boundary lines either 
to shape or limit other growths. The or- 
derly progress here is complicated mainly 
by one thing, — a continuous accretion of 
outside elements — due to immigration — 
which creates difficulties in assimilation. 
The chief problem of Christianity is to keep 
pace with the continuous growth ; the im- 
mediate peril is that it may be wholly ignored 
in the pressure of competing growths. 

II. The South Sea Islands, of which the 
New Hebrides are a type, lie exactly at the 
opposite end of the scale. Growth, so far 
from being active, has not even begun. 
Here are no nations, scarcely even tribes. 
The first step in evolution, aggregation, has 
not yet taken place. These people are still 
at zero; they are the Amoebae of the hu- 
man world. There is no complication here 
of unassimilated elements introduced by im- 
migration, but a serious opposite difficulty 
— depletion due to emigration to other 



168 THE PROBLEM OF 

countries, and to other causes which vitally 
affect the whole future problem. As to re- 
ligion here, the field is altogether open, for 
there is none at all. 

III. China. Midway between the South 
Sea Islands and the Australian colonies, this 
nation, as every one knows, is an instance 
of arrested development. On the fair way 
to become a higher vertebrate, it has stopped 
short at the crustacean. There are two 
complications: the amazing strength of the 
exoskeleton — the external shell of custom 
and tradition, so hardened by the deposits 
of centuries as to make the evolutionist's 
demand for mobility, i. e., for capacity to 
change, almost non-existent. Secondly, 
which directly concerns Christianity, there 
is a very powerful religion already in posses- 
sion. These two complications make the 
missionary problem in China one of the most 
delicate in the world. 

IV. If the South Sea Islands are the 
opposite of Australia, China, in turn, finds 
its almost perfect contrast in Japan. One 
with it in stagnation and isolation from 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 169 

external influences during three thousand 
years, almost within the last hour Japan has 
broken what Mr. Bagehot calls its " cake of 
custom," and so sudden and mature has al- 
ready been its development that it is, at this 
moment demanding from the Powers of 
Europe political recognition as one of the 
civilised nations of the world. This is an 
entirely different case from any of the pre- 
ceding. It is the insect emerging from the 
chrysalis. From the Christian standpoint, 
the case is unique in history. Its own re- 
ligion was abandoned a few years ago, and 
the country is at present looking for another. 
Even this rough classification will serve 
to show how far from simple the missionary 
question really is, how the problem varies 
from place to place, how different the equip- 
ment for each particular field, how wise the 
mind which should know where to strike 
in, how responsible the hand which would 
finger these subtle threads of human des- 
tiny, or move among the roots of national 
life, which God alone has tended in the 
past. To the Christian evolutionist these 



170 THE PROBLEM OF 

differences are educative. They mark dif- 
ferent stages in the coming of the Kingdom 
of God on earth, none of them in vain, all 
of them to be allowed for, some perhaps to 
be reset in the superstructure Christianity 
would build upon them. 

Suppose now the Churches had compiled 
a classification on some such lines of all the 
mission fields of the world, it would serve 
two practical purposes. In the first place, 
it would be the duty of the would-be mis- 
sionary to go over that list, and select from 
it the exact kind of work to which he was 
most suited. In this way the missionary 
staff would be differentiated with more 
exactness than at present. Each man, also, 
having made his choice, would further equip 
himself along particular lines, and become 
a specialist at his work. In the second 
place, and what is just now of even more 
importance, it would make it possible for 
some men to be missionaries, and these 
among the best men entering the Univer- 
sities, who see no room for themselves at 
present in the foreign field. Some men 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 171 

with such a review before them might see 
at once that there was no place for them in 
missionary work at all ; but others, and, I 
believe, a larger number than have ever 
been attracted by this career, would find 
there something open to them — would find 
in a service which they had looked upon, 
perhaps, as somewhat limited and narrow, 
something which, when looked upon in all 
its length and breadth, was large enough 
and rich enough in practical possibilities to 
make them offer to it the whole-hearted 
work of their lives. To-day, certainly, some 
of the best men do go to the foreign field ; 
but the reason why more do not go is not 
indifference to its claims, but uncertainty as 
to whether they are exactly the type of men 
wanted, L e., in plain language, uncertainty 
as to whether the cut of their theology quite 
qualifies them to be the successors of Carey 
or Williams. These men feel orthodox 
enough, of course, to be clergymen at home, 
but they have a secret sense that their 
views might be scarcely the thing on Ero- 
manga. The missionary theology — it is 



i;2 THE PROBLEM OF 

useless disguising it — is supposed to be a 
very special article, and a kind of theologi- 
cal modesty forbids some of our strongest 
men from considering it conceivable that 
they should ever aspire to be missionaries. 
Now this feeling is very real, but I am con- 
vinced that it is very ignorant — ignorant 
of the changed standpoint from which scores 
of our missionaries are even now doing their 
work, ignorant of the world's real needs, 
ignorant of the hospitality which they 
would receive from many at least of the 
officials of most of the Mission Boards. 
And yet these Boards are not wholly guilt- 
less of having made it appear, or permitting 
it to continue understood, that only those of 
a certain type need look for welcome at 
their doors. I am not referring to any par- 
ticular Church ; but I do not think the mis- 
sion committees of the world have ever 
worded an advertisement for men in lan- 
guage modern enough to include the class 
of whom I speak. I am not arguing for 
free-lances, or budding sceptics, or rational- 
ists being turned loose on our mission fields. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 173 

But for young men — and our colleges were 
never richer in them than at this moment — 
who combine with all modern culture the 
consecrated spirit and the Christ-like life ; 
for men who are too honest to go under 
false pretences to a work which, though 
they be not yet specially enthusiastic for it, 
they are entirely willing to face, there ought 
to go forth a new and more charitable call. 
It ought at least to be understood that what 
qualifies to-day for the leading Churches at 
home ought not to disqualify for the work 
of Christ abroad, but that there is for Chris- 
tian men of the highest originality and 
power a career in the foreign field at least 
as great and rational as that at home. In- 
deed, so far from such men feeling as if 
they were not wanted in the foreign field, 
or at the best that their presence there 
could but be tolerated by the Mission 
Boards, I am sure the committee, at least 
of some Churches, not only want these men 
to-day, but scarcely want anything else. 

First, always, in opening a new mission 
field comes the splendid work of the pioneer, 



174 THE PROBLEM OF 

the old missionary pioneer of the Sunday- 
school picture books, who stands with his 
Bible under the stereotyped palm-tree, ex- 
horting the crowd of impossible blacks. 
These we have had in most fields now, and 
their work must still and always continue. 
But next we have these same men in settled 
charges, founding congregations, planting 
schools, and carrying on the whole evangeli- 
cal work of the Christian Church. But next, 
among these, and gathered from these, and 
in addition to these, we require a further 
class not wholly absorbed with specific 
charges, or ecclesiastical progress, or the in- 
culcation of Western creeds, but whose out- 
look goes forth to the nation as a whole ; 
men who in many ways not directly on the 
programme of the missionary society will 
help on its education, its morality, and its 
healthy progress in all that makes for right- 
eousness. This man, besides being the mis- 
sionary, is the Christian politician, the apostle 
of a new social order, the moulder and con- 
solidator of the State. He places the accent, 
if such an extreme expression of a distinction 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 175 

may be allowed, not on the progress of a 
Church, but on the coming of the Kingdom 
of God. He is not the herald, but the 
prophet of the Cross. 

Of course every missionary who nowadays 
sets out for a foreign field acquires before- 
hand some general idea of the lie of things 
in the country to which he goes ; but what 
is needed is more than a general idea. The 
Christianising of a nation such as China or 
Japan is an intricate ethical, philosophical 
and social as well as Christian problem ; the 
serious taking of any new country indeed is 
not to be done by casual sharp-shooters 
bringing down their man or two here and 
there, but by a carefully thought out attack 
upon central points, or by patient siege, 
planned with all a military tactician's know- 
ledge. We have at present, and, as already 
said, we shall always need, and they will al- 
ways do their measure of good, devoted men 
of the sharp-shooter order who aim at single 
souls ; but in addition to these the Kingdom 
of God needs men who work with a wider 
vision — men prepared by fulness of histori- 



176 THE PROBLEM OF 

cal, ethnological, and sociological knowledge 
to become the statesmen of the Kingdom of 
God. 

Let me spend what time remains in briefly 
expanding the classification already given — 
partly to illustrate better what I mean, but 
especially to furnish a few materials to help 
those whose eyes, when they think of their fu- 
ture life, sometimes turn towards distant lands. 

I begin with the New Hebrides — mainly 
because least is known about them. The 
New Hebrides mission represents a class of 
missions differing so essentially from those 
of the third and fourth classes — China and 
Japan — that any one who was taught to re- 
gard it as a typical mission work would be 
completely misguided ; and for some men at 
least a mission work of this order would be 
almost the last thing they would throw them- 
selves into. For what are the real facts? 
The New Hebrides are a group of small 
islands, a few about the size of Arran, a very 
few others two or three times as large, the 
whole of no geographical importance. They 
are peopled by beings of the lowest human 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 177 

type to the number of probably not more 
than 50,000, so that they are of no political 
importance. This does not refer to the 
islands, but to the people. The islands 
themselves are of so great political import- 
ance at the present moment that the allegi- 
ance of Australia to England would tremble 
in the balance if there were any suspicion 
that the Home Government would hand 
them over to France. The population may 
be over or under that here stated. I have 
taken my figures from authorities on the 
spot, but any approximation to the numbers 
of inhabitants on these partially explored 
islands must be a guess. Whether we regard 
their quality or quantity, they can never play 
any appreciable part in the world's story; 
and the question which would immediately 
rise in the mind of the man who looked at 
the world from the standpoint of evolution 
would be the direct one : Is it really worth 
while sending twenty first-rate men to till 
this vineyard which can never contribute 
anything of importance to mankind? If it 
be replied, But is it proved that they will 



12 



178 THE PROBLEM OF 

not? the answer is a sad one. A closer 
study of these islands shows that instead of 
increasing their population, these are dying 
fast. On the first which I visited, Aneityum, 
when the missionaries reached it, there were 
some thousands of inhabitants. To-day 
there is a bare four hundred of depressed 
and sickly souls. The children are swept 
away by the white man's epidemics almost 
as soon as they are born, and the mission- 
aries tell you that the total doom of this 
island may be a matter of some score years. 
The very church which was built for the 
islanders in better days has had to be cut in 
two, and even the portioned half is now too 
large; and a small chapel is to be built to 
hold the remnant of this once noble flock. 
It is a dismal story, but it is more than likely 
that it will be repeated in time to a greater 
or less extent, not only throughout this 
group, but throughout the whole of the un- 
christianised South Sea Islands. At New 
Caledonia I found the depletion of popula- 
tion even more appalling ; and though here 
and there an island may escape, the ultimate 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 179 

prospect is almost total obliteration. This 
being so, what man who entered the mission 
field from the standpoint from which I 
speak, what man who wished his work, how- 
ever small, to contribute to the permanent 
evolution of the world, would choose the 
New Hebrides for his mission field? No 
man would. Yet is the inference then to be 
drawn that this mission is a mistake ? There 
is a book by an accomplished clergyman 
called Wrong Missions to Wrong Races in 
Wrong Places. Is its thesis, when it an- 
swers this question in the affirmative, cor- 
rect ? I should be the last to say so, though 
its warning is a true one. For, as we have 
seen, there are missions and missions; and 
this mission belongs to a type which ought to 
be more clearly defined and acknowledged. 

In the evolutionary branch of missions it 
has simply no place at all — no place at all. 
It is a mistake from first to last. But it 
does not belong to this class, and is not 
to be judged by its standards — perhaps by 
higher ones. It belongs to the Order of 
the Good Samaritan. It is a mission of 



1 80 THE PROBLEM OF 

pure benevolence. Its parallel is the mis- 
sion of Father Damien on the Leper Island. 
Who shall say that there are not, and will 
not always be, men among us who see that 
kind of mission, men who have no intel- 
lectual apprehension of evolution, but who 
possess the pitiful heart ? Or who will say 
that the day will ever come when the leaders 
of the wider movement will grudge such men 
to the lost places of the earth ? 

I cannot leave this subject without paying 
my passing tribute — may I say my homage ? 
for tribute they need not — to the missionaries 
of the New Hebrides themselves. From a 
recent biography which all of you have read, 
you know something of the difficulties of 
their work. You remember the description 
of the Island of Tanna, the remoteness of 
its position, the strangeness of its language, 
the fierceness of its people; you remember 
how daily the savages sought the mission- 
ary's life, and how after years of facing 
death in a hundred forms he was driven 
from their shores with scarcely a single con- 
vert for his hire. Last June, sailing along 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 181 

Tanna, I tried to land near Mr. Paton's de- 
serted field. With me was one of the mis- 
sionaries who has now gained a footing on 
another part of that still cannibal island. 
As we neared the shore, a hundred painted 
savages poured from out the woods, and pre- 
pared to fire upon us with their guns and 
poisoned arrows. But the missionary stood 
up in the bow of the boat and spoke two 
words to them in their native tongue. In- 
stantly every gun was laid upon the beach, 
and they rushed into the surf to welcome us 
ashore. No other unarmed man on this 
earth could have landed there. It meant 
that the foundation-stone of civilisation upon 
Tanna was already laid. Every island was 
once like Tanna ; some are like it still. But 
on one after another the cannibal spirit 
has been already conquered; schools are 
planted everywhere ; and neat churches and 
manses gleam through the palm-trees, and 
signify to the few ships which wander in 
those seas that here at least life and property 
are safe. At Eromanga I went to see the 
spot on the beach where Williams fell. Hard 



1 82 THE PROBLEM OF 

by were the graves of his murdered succes- 
sors, Mr. and Mrs. Gordon. Their almost 
immediate successor, Mr. Robertson, is there 
to-day, his large church and beautiful manse 
within a stone-throw of the place where these 
first martyrs died ; his leading elder the son 
of the cannibal who murdered Gordon. This 
monster left three sons; they are all elders 
of the Church, and life is as safe throughout 
that island to-day as in England. For the 
first year of their life in Eromanga Mr. and 
Mrs. Robertson lived in a bullet-proof stock- 
ade. They left it only under cover of night 
for a few yards, and on few occasions, once 
to bury their first-born babe. For a year 
they never saw a European. Their work 
was to let the people look at them. Their 
message was to be kind. By-and-by ac- 
quaintance was picked up with one or two 
natives ; the circle of influence spread, and 
after years of extraordinary patience and self- 
denial, their lives again and again hanging 
by a thread, they won this island for civilisa- 
tion and Christianity. 

On another island, where the missionary 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 183 

two years ago used to see the smoke of the 
cannibal feasts from his door-step, the natives 
brought me their spears and bows and poi- 
soned arrows. " We do not need them now," 
they said ; " the missionary has taught us not 
to kill." 

I have no words to express my admiration 
for these men, and, may I say, their wives, 
their even more heroic wives ; they are per- 
fect missionaries, their toil has paid a hun- 
dred times ; and I count it one of the privi- 
leges of my life to have been one of the few 
eye-witnesses of their w r ork. 

As to the calls of this field for more men, 
I must add this. It is a proof of the sound 
sense of the New Hebrides missionaries, that 
they are pretty unanimous in agreeing that, 
considering the needs of the rest of the 
world, they have already a quite fair portion 
of workers. The staff, of course, could be 
doubled or trebled to-morrow with great 
advantage, but the missionaries do not ask 
it. With their present resources and the 
number of native teachers who are in train- 
ing, they hope in time to cover these islands 



1 84 THE PROBLEM OF 

with mission stations by themselves. I con- 
fess these are the least greedy missionaries I 
ever heard of. 

I am sorry that, owing to the shortness of 
my visit to China, I should feel it a pure pre- 
sumption to say almost anything about this* 
the greatest mission field in the world. 
What I can offer is but a surface impression, 
and I warn you beforehand it is little worth. 
From the old standpoint the work in China 
seems to be splendid ; men and women from 
every Christian Church in the world are 
busy all over the land, and small congrega- 
tions of native Christians are springing up 
everywhere along their track. The industry 
and devotion of the workers — Roman 
Catholic, Episcopalian, Congregational, Pres- 
byterian, Wesleyan, and a host of others — 
is beyond all praise, and there is not one of 
the missionaries who will not tell you he is 
encouraged, that he sees some fruit, and that 
the future is full of hope. There seems to 
be great care, moreover, in the admission to 
the Churches of native Christians, and the 
belief in education and in medical missions 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 185 

is widely rooted. But from the ideal of a 
Christian evolution, there remains very much 
to criticise — happily less in the direction of 
commission than of omission. This band of 
missionaries — I speak not of this society or 
of that, for the work of each separate society 
is compact enough in itself, but of the army 
as a whole — is no steady phalanx set on a 
fixed campaign, but a disordered host of gue- 
rillas recruited from all denominations, wear- 
ing all uniforms, and waging a random fight. 
Some are equipped with obsolete weapons, 
some with modern armament ; but they pos- 
sess no common programme or consistent 
method. Besides being confusing to the 
Chinese, this means great waste of power, 
great loss of cumulative effect. This, of 
course, is inevitable at first, and it is not the 
sin of the missionaries, but of Christendom ; 
and, after the late Shanghai conference, there 
is more than a hope that even this in time 
may be remedied. But what one would 
really like to see in addition to greater con- 
centration, would be a more serious recon- 
sideration of the manner of approach and 



1 86 THE PROBLEM OF 

the form of message most suited to the 
Chinese mind and nature and tradition, and 
some further contribution to the question 
how far its form of Christianity is to be 
Western, or how far a Chinese basis is pos- 
sible or permissible. These questions might 
be left to adjust themselves but for one most 
serious fact: the converts in China, in the 
majority of districts, are almost exclusively 
drawn at present from the lower classes. 
There are exceptions, but the educated 
classes as a whole, the merchants and the 
mandarins, remain, I understand, almost 
wholly untouched. There is something 
wrong if this be the case. And leaving the 
present machinery to do the good work it is 
doing among the poor, I would join with the 
best of the missionaries in arguing for a few 
Rabbis to be sent to China, or to be picked 
from our fine scholars already there, who 
would quietly reconnoitre the whole situa- 
tion, and shape the teaching of the country 
along well-considered lines — men, especially, 
who would lay themselves out through edu- 
cation, lectures, preaching, and literature to 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 187 

reach the intellect of the Empire. That 
some men are aiming at this, and doing it 
splendidly, we are already well aware. It is 
the direct policy of many missionaries and 
even of whole societies. But it is these mis- 
sionaries themselves who are crying out for 
more of it. Men will not take the trouble to 
enquire what some of these societies are 
really aiming at and really doing, and, in 
ignorance of either, they regard the whole 
missionary work as a waste of time and 
money. The things also which one hears of 
missionaries, in talking with the business 
men of the Eastern ports : the contempt, 
the charges of inefficiency, impracticableness, 
and general uselessness, are enough to make 
any traveller, not well on his guard, renounce 
the mission cause for ever. These impres- 
sions are reimported into this country by 
ninety out of every hundred men who return 
home from the great commercial houses of 
the East, and they build up a public opinion 
against foreign missions most wanton and 
most false. As a rule these critics have 
never had ten minutes' serious talk with a 



188 THE PROBLEM OF 

missionary in their lives. If they had, they 
would find two things. First, that there 
were some missionaries a thousand times 
worse in folly and incompetence than they 
had ever imagined ; and, secondly, that there 
were others, and these by far the greater 
majority, than whom no wiser, saner, more 
practical men could be found in any of the 
business houses of the world. It is men of 
this latter class, and not merely the passing 
traveller, who are calling out to-day for more 
scientific work and more rational methods in 
the mission field. They are perfectly aware 
that the evangelisation of China is not a 
mere carrying of the Gospel to illiterate and 
heathen savages ; and that perfect knowledge 
both of the modes of thought of the people 
and of the true genius of Christianity is 
needed to direct a campaign that will be 
permanently effective there. The mission- 
ary who is an educationist, who has some 
scientific and philosophic training, who knows 
something of sociology and political economy, 
and who will apply these in Christian forms 
to China, is the man most needed there at 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 189 

the present hour. For it is to be remem- 
bered that this is a case of arrested motion, 
and that the most natural development, per- 
haps the only possible one, certainly the only 
permanent one, will be one which is a con- 
tinuation of that already begun rather than 
one entirely abnormal and foreign. 

It was new to me, though I ought to have 
known it before, that the Chinese, instead of 
looking up to Europeans, regard them as a 
most inferior and even barbaric people — 
clever, certainly, in a few directions, but with 
no sort of authority to instruct a Celestial. 
In most mission fields the missionary has a 
platform simply in the fact that he is a white 
man, that he came in a steamship, and wears 
a hat ; but the Chinaman has no such hallu- 
cination. He listens to a European mission- 
ary much as a London crowd would listen to 
a Red Indian — half curious, half amused, but 
wholly contemptuous as to his pretension to 
teach him anything. It is the deliberate 
opinion of many men who know China in- 
timately, who are sympathetic with mission- 
aries, who are even missionaries themselves, 



190 THE PROBLEM OF 

that half of the preaching, and especially the 
itinerating preaching, now being carried on 
throughout the Empire is absolutely useless. 
Some go so far as to say that it even does 
harm, that its ignorance and general quality 
make it almost an impertinence. In New 
York I met an influential Christian layman 
who had just returned from a visit to China, 
where his son was a missionary; and he 
assured me that he meant to devote this 
entire winter to opening the eyes of the 
American Churches to the futility and false- 
ness of method of much that was being done 
— being done in perfect good faith — by 
worthy men and worthy women, to convert 
the people of China. I cannot verify this 
criticism ; I merely record it. But at a time 
when the loud cry for hundreds of more lay- 
men to pour into China is sounding over 
this land the warning ought at least to be 
heard. I go further. This call is frequently 
uttered in such terms as to take almost an 
unfair advantage of a certain class of Chris- 
tians — uttered with a harrowing importunity 
and sensationalism of appeal which when it 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 191 

falls upon a tender conscience or an excited 
mind, makes it seem blasphemy to decline. 
The kind of missionary secured by this pro- 
cess, to say the least, is neither the wisest 
nor the best ; and not only China needs to 
be protected from these men, but they need to 
be protected from themselves and from those 
who, in genuine but unbalanced zeal, appeal 
to them — protected by sober statements 
from sober men, who love the word of God, 
and the souls of men not less, but who under- 
stand both better. 

I pass now to a country where the situa- 
tion is more delicate still. Japan is the most 
interesting country in the world at this 
moment. The past never witnessed a birth 
of a civilised nation so remarkable, so orderly, 
so sudden. Within the lifetime of all of us 
the Japanese were a wholly unilluminated 
race. They kept their doors shut against 
outside influence of every kind. No for- 
eigner could even enter the land. To-day 
all is changed. They sent envoys to France, 
who brought back law ; others to Germany, 
who gave them a military organisation. 



192 THE PROBLEM OF 

From England they borrowed a navy; from 
America, a system of national education. 
From the civilised world in general they im- 
ported a most perfect telegraph and postal 
system, railways and tramways, the electric 
light, Universities, technical colleges, and, 
within the last few months, Houses of Parlia- 
ment and a vote. The Japanese have set 
themselves up, in short, with all the material 
and machinery of an advanced and rising 
civilised State — all the material except one. 
They have no religion. As was inevitable, 
heathenism has been abolished, and, as al- 
ready said, the people are in the unique posi- 
tion at present of prospecting for a religion. 
Now, this last fact having become some- 
what known, Japan to-day presents the 
spectacle of having already within its borders 
representatives from every Church in Chris- 
tendom prospecting for converts. Even the 
politicians being fairly agreed — and this in 
itself is most striking — that some sort of 
religion is necessary, these representatives 
are eagerly listened to, and get a perfectly 
honest chance. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 193 

The noblest building in the capital of 
Japan is the Cathedral of the Greek Church. 
Roman Catholics are there, Unitarians are 
there, Episcopalians of different degrees of 
height and Presbyterians of different degrees 
of breadth, and Methodists of different 
degrees of heat, and Baptists and Indepen- 
dents, and Theosophists and Spiritualists, 
and every sect and church and denomination 
under heaven. The issue will be one of the 
most interesting events in ecclesiastical his- 
tory. For there is no favouritism and no 
prejudice. When the result is known, it will 
be the purest possible case of the survival of 
the fittest. 

One cannot at all say at present who has 
it. It will be some sort of Christianity; 
probably not now the Roman Catholic or the 
Greek; and what makes the situation so 
extremely interesting and the hour so over- 
whelmingly important, is that every Christian 
man, and every Christian book, and every 
Christian stroke of work that are given to 
Japan have an immediate and almost palpa- 
ble influence upon this problem. Such is 

13 



194 THE PROBLEM OF 

the mood and such is the malleability of this 
nation at the present hour, that if a Christian 
of great size arose to-morrow, either among 
the Japanese themselves or among the 
European missionaries, he could almost give 
the country its religion. If there be here 
one prophet, or half a prophet, or even the 
making of half a prophet, let me assure him 
that there is no field in the world to-day, 
where, so far as man can judge, his best years 
could be lived to so great a purpose. 

With the mention of two more facts, I am 
done with Japan. You are aware that the 
work of the missionaries has been so success- 
ful that there are already thousands upon 
thousands of Christian converts in the coun- 
try. Very many of these know English as 
well as we do, and many are perfectly read 
in every form of modern European literature, 
and as able and as cultured as the picked 
men in our Universities. The man among 
these men whom I found was most regarded 
as a leader of thought among the Japanese 
Christians, made to me this striking state- 
ment : " We have got," he said, " our 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 195 

Christianity almost exclusively from the 
missionaries, especially from the American 
missionaries, and we can never thank them 
enough. But after a little we began to look 
at it for ourselves, and we made a discovery. 
We found that Christianity was a greater 
and a richer thing than the missionaries told 
us. Perhaps they themselves were second- 
handed. At any rate, we must henceforth 
look at it for ourselves. We want Christian- 
ity, not perhaps necessarily a Western 
Christianity." His next sentence was ex- 
pressed with some hesitation and much 
delicacy, but it meant this — " In the past 
they have helped us much ; but . . . they 
may now . . . go." 

In justice to the missionaries, let me say 
that one or two of the few whom I met were 
quite aware that this feeling existed towards 
some of them ; and they also knew its cause ; 
others knew that the Japanese were begin- 
ning to think them de trop, but they attrib- 
uted it to conceit, and to the general 
anti-English reaction lately set in in all 
departments. But all were agreed that the 



196 THE PROBLEM OF 

Japanese church could not yet be left to 
stand alone. What exactly my critic would 
have replied, or rather how exactly he would 
have qualified by further statement of his 
meaning, may possibly be inferred from the 
other circumstances which I wish to name. 
It happened in Tokio that I had the privi- 
lege of addressing some thirty or forty 
Japanese Christian pastors. At the close I 
asked them if they had any message they 
would like me to take home with me to the 
Churches here or in America. They ap- 
pointed a spokesman, who stood up and told 
me, in their name, that there were two things 
they would like me to say. The one was, 
" Tell them to send us one six thousand 
dollar missionary, rather than ten two thou- 
sand dollar missionaries." But the second 
request went deeper. I again give the 
exact words — "Tell them," he said, "that 
we want them to send us no more doctrines. 
Japan wants Christ." 

I trust the narrative of these two facts will 
not be taken as a reproach to the mission- 
aries. If they represent a true feeling, it is 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 197 

rather to their lasting honour that in a few 
years they should have taught the native 
Christians to see so far. Of the actual mis- 
sion work in Japan I can say nothing, for I 
was only a few days there. But if I were to 
judge from the Japanese converts whom I 
met, I would question whether any mission 
work in the world had ever produced fruit of 
so fine a quality. How deep it is, how per- 
manent it is, remain for the test of time to 
declare ; but the immediate outlook, though 
disheartening possibly to individual mission- 
aries, seems to me one of the richest hope 
and promise. 

I had meant in closing to turn to Australia 
and make a bid for able men for that Greater 
Britain, but there is only time for a word. 
Composed largely of men whom the rush for 
wealth has drawn from an older civilisation, 
the Church's problem in that colossal conti- 
nent — you are aware it is as big as Europe 
— is to establish the new civilisation in truth 
and righteousness. Who, where every man 
is making money, is to make just laws, to raise 
social standards, to purify political ideals? 



198 THE PROBLEM OF 

Two kinds of ministers are required to be 
directly or indirectly the leaders of this work. 

( i ) Men of the highest culture and ability 
as ministers for the large towns; men who 
are preachers and students. There is no 
more influential sphere in the world than 
that open to a cultured preacher in one of 
the capital cities of Australia. His influence 
will tell upon the whole colony almost imme- 
diately, and as a public man he will have 
opportunities of giving a tone and direction 
even to political life such as no one at home 
possesses. At this moment there are some 
three or four vacant churches of the very first 
rank which must be supplied from home; 
and if these are shut to students or proba- 
tioners, any man of strength in that new 
land can raise a minor charge to an equal 
place within two or three years' time. 

(2) The second kind of man that is wanted, 
and he is wanted not by the dozen, but by 
the score, is the bush minister. This man 
must be a man; he must be ready, and 
adaptable ; he may be as unprofessional as 
he pleases, but he must be a Christian gen- 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 199 

tleman. His work will be to keep up an 
occasional service at some half-dozen wooden 
chapels — oases in the wilderness of forest 
and scrub — or to hold services in barns or, 
on great occasions, in some village church. 
You will see why I have allocated the man 
who is the student to the city. This man 
cannot study, or cannot study much. He is 

the evangelist, the other the teacher. 

• • • • • 

If one saw a single navvy trying to remove 
a mountain, the desolation of the situation 
would be appalling. Most of us have seen a 
man, or two, or a hundred or two — minis- 
ters, missionaries, Christian laymen — at work 
upon the higher evolution of the world ; but 
it is when one sees them by the thousand in 
every land, and in every tongue, and the 
mountain honey-combed and slowly crum- 
bling, on each of its frowning sides, that the 
majesty of the missionary work fills and 

inspires the mind. 

• • • • • 

Gentlemen, finally, what a field the world 
is for any man who means, as Goethe says, to 



200 THE PROBLEM OF 

be a hammer and not an anvil! We have 
looked down only three or four of the vistas 
of useful work which in every region of the 
earth are opening up ; but how attractive, 
how alluring each of them is to the man with 
a generous purpose in his soul ! There is 
one thing for which I love the very sound of 
the word Evolution — its immense hope, its 
indescribable faith. Darwin's great discovery, 
or the discovery which he brought into 
prominence, is the same as Galileo's — that 
the world moves. The Italian prophet said 
it moved from West to East, the English 
philosopher said it moved from low to high. 
The message of science to this age is that all 
Nature is on the side of the men or of the 
nation who is trying to rise. An ascending 
energy is in the universe, and the whole 
moves on with the mighty idea and anticipa- 
tion of the Ascent of Man. 

The progress of the past seems almost to 
guarantee the future. Here there may be 
retardation, there obstruction, but somehow 
we have learned to believe that the mass 
moves on. Yesterday saw divergence from 



FOREIGN MISSIONS 201 

the faith, to-day mourned persecution ; but 
somehow to-morrow we feel that the sun will 
shine again on a Kingdom of God which has 
also somehow grown. After all, this instru- 
ment of science, this discoverer of a secret 
motion in the world, this great calmer of 
faithless men, this rebuker of quaking saints, 
is a religious teacher — we work with it, we 
look with its eyes, we hear its voice, and it 
says with Browning — 

" God *s in His Heaven, 
All 's right with the world." 



The Contribution 
of Science to 
Christianity 



The Contribution of 
Science to Christianity 

THERE is nothing more inspiring just 
now to the religious mind than the 
expansion of the intellectual area of Chris- 
tianity. Christianity seemed for a time to 
have ceased to adapt itself to the widening 
range of secular knowledge, and the think- 
ing world had almost left its side. But the 
expansion of Christianity can never be alto- 
gether contemporaneous with the growth 
of knowledge. For new truth must be so- 
lidified by time before it can be built into 
the eternal truth of the Christian system. 
Yet, sooner or later, the conquest comes ; 
sooner or later, whether it be art or music, 
history or philosophy, Christianity utilises 
the best that the world finds, and gives it 
a niche in the temple of God. 

To the student of God's ways, who rev- 



206 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

erently marks His progressive revelation 
and scans the horizon for each new fulfil- 
ment, the field of science presents just now 
a spectacle of bewildering interest. To say 
that he regards it with expectation is feebly 
to realise the dignity and import of the time. 
He looks at science with awe. It is the 
thing that is moving, unfolding. It is the 
breaking of a fresh seal. It is the new 
chapter of the world's history. What it 
contains for Christianity, or against ii y he 
knows not. What it will do or undo — for 
in the fulfilling it may undo — he cannot 
tell. The plot is just at its thickest as he 
opens the page; the problems are more in 
number and more intricate than they have 
ever been before, and he waits almost with 
excitement for the next development. 

And yet this attitude of Christianity 
towards science is as free from false hope 
as it is from false fear. It has no false fear, 
for it knows the strange fact that this plot 
is always at its thickest ; and its hope of a 
quick solution is without extravagance, for 
it has learned the slowness of God's unfold- 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 207 

ing and His patient tempering of revelation 
to the young world which has to bear the 
strain. But, for all this, we cannot open 
this new and closely written page as if it had 
little to give us. With nature as God's 
work ; with man, God's finest instrument, as 
its investigator; with a multitude of the 
finest of these finest instruments, in labora- 
tory, field, and study, hourly engaged upon 
this book, exploring, deciphering, sifting, 
and verifying — it is impossible that there 
should not be a solid, original, and ever- 
increasing gain. Add to this man's known 
wish to know more, and God's wish that he 
should know more \ — for nature is fuller of 
nothing than of invitations to learn — and 
we shall see how true it is that nature has 
but to be asked, to give her best. 

The one thing to be careful about in ap- 
proaching nature is, that we really come to 
be taught; and the same attitude is honour- 
ably due to its interpreter, science. Religion \ 
is probably only learning for the first time 
how to approach science. Their former 
intercourse, from faults on both sides, and 



/ 



208 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

these mainly due to juvenility, is not a thing 
to remember. After the first quarrel — for 
they began the centuries hand in hand — the 
question of religion to science was simply 
" How dare you speak at all ? " Then, as 
science held to its right to speak just a little, 
the question became, " What new menace to 
our creed does your latest discovery por- 
tend ? " By-and-by both became wiser, and 
the coarser conflict ceased. Then we find 
religion suggesting a compromise, and ask- 
ing simply what particular adjustment to its 
last hypothesis science would demand. But 
we do not speak now of the right to be heard, 
or of menaces to our faith, or even of com- 
promises. Our question is a much maturer 
one — we ask what contribution science has 
to bestow, what good gift the wise men are 
bringing now to lay at the feet of our Christ. 
This question marks an immense advance in 
the relation between science and Christianity, 
and we should be careful to sustain it. Noth- 
ing is more easily thrown out of working 
order than the balance between different 
spheres of thought. The least assumption 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 209 

of superiority on the part of one, the least 
hint of a challenge, even a suggestion of in- 
dependence, may provoke a quarrel. In one 
sense religion is independent of science, but 
in another it is not. For science is not inde- 
pendent of religion, and religion dare not 
leave it. One notices sometimes a disposi- 
tion in religious writers, not only to make 
light of the claims of science, to smile at its 
attempts to help them, to despise its patron- 
age, but even to taunt it with its impotence 
to touch the higher problems of life and 
being at all. Now science has feelings. 
This impotence is a fact, but it is the limita- 
tion simply of its function in the scheme of 
thought ; and to taunt it with its insufficiency 
to perform other functions is a vulgar way 
to make it jealous of that which does per- 
form them. We live in an intellectual com- 
mune, and owe too much to each other to 
reflect on a neighbours poverty, even when 
it puts on appearances. 

The result of the modern systematic study 
of nature has been to raise up in our midst 
a body of truth with almost unique claims to 

14 



210 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

acceptance. The grounds of this acceptance 
are laid bare to all the world. There is 
nothing esoteric about science. It has no 
secrets. Its facts can be seen and handled : 
they are facts ; they are nature itself. Apart 
therefore from their attractiveness or utility, 
men feel that here at last they have some- 
thing to believe in, something independent of 
opinion, prejudice, self-interest, or tradition. 
This feeling is a splendid testimony to man 
as well as to nature. And we do not grudge 
to science the vigour and devotion of its stu- 
dents, for, like all true devotion, it is founded 
on an intense faith. Now the mere presence 
of this body of truth, so solid, so transparent, 
so verifiable, immediately affects all else that 
lies in the field of knowledge. And it 
affects it in different ways. Some things it 
scatters to the winds at once. They have 
been the birthright of mankind for ages, it 
may be ; their venerableness matters not, 
they must go. And the power of the new- 
comer is so self-evident that they require no 
telling, but disappear of themselves. In this 
way the modern world has been rid of a 
hundred superstitions. 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 211 

Among other things which have been 
brought to this bar is Christianity. It 
knows it can approve itself to science ; but 
it is taken by surprise, and therefore begs 
time. It will honestly look up its credentials, 
and adjust itself, if necessary, to the new 
relation. Now this is the position of theol- 
ogy at the present moment. The purifica- 
tion of religion, Herbert Spencer tells us, 
has always come from science. In this 
case it is largely true. And theology pro- 
ceeds by asking science what it demands, 
and then borrows its instruments to carry 
out the improvements. This loan of the 
instruments constitutes the first great con- 
tribution of science to religion. 

What are these instruments ? We shall 
name two — the Scientific Method and the 
Doctrine of Evolution. The first is the in- 
strument for the interpretation of Nature; 
the second is given us as the method of 
Nature itself. With the first of these we 
shall deal formally ; the second will present 
itself in various shapes as we proceed. 

In emphasising the scientific method as 



212 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

a contribution from science to Christianity, 
it is not to be understood that science has 
an exclusive, or even a prior claim, either to 
its discovery or possession. Along with the 
germs of all great things, it is found in the 
Bible ; and theologians all along have fallen 
into its vein at times, though they have sel- 
dom pursued it long or with entire abandon- 
ment. There are examples of work done in 
modern theology, German and English, by 
the use of this method, which for the purity, 
consistency, and reverence with which it is 
applied are not surpassed by anything that 
physical science has produced. At the same 
time, this is par excellence the method of sci- 
ence. The perfecting of the instrument, 
the most lucid exhibition of its powers, the 
education in its use, above all the intellect- 
ual revolution which has compelled its appli- 
cation in every field of knowledge, we owe 
to natural science. Theology has had its 
share in this great movement, how much we 
need not ask, or seek to prove. The day is 
past for quarrelling over rights of discovery; 
and whether we owe the scientific method 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 213 

to Job and Paul, or to Bacon and Darwin, is 
just the kind of question which the posses- 
sion of this instrument would warn us not 
to touch. 

To see what the scientific method has done 
for Christianity, we have only to ask our- 
selves what it is. The things which it 
insists upon are mainly two — the value of 
facts, and the value of laws. From the first 
of these comes the integrity of science ; from 
the second its beauty and force. On bare 
facts science from first to last is based. 
Bacon's contribution to science was simply 
that he vindicated the place and power, the 
eternal worth, of facts; Darwin's, that he 
supplied it with facts. Now if Christianity 
possesses anything it possesses facts. So 
long as the facts were presented to the world 
Christianity spread with marvellous rapidity. 
But there came a time when the facts were 
less exhibited to men than the evidence for 
the facts. Theology, that is to say, began 
to rest on authority. Men or manuscripts 
were quoted as authorities for these facts, 
always with a loss of impressiveness, a loss 



214 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

increasing rapidly as time distanced the facts 
themselves. Then as the facts became more 
and more remote the Churches became the 
authorities rather than individual witnesses, 
and this was accompanied by a still further 
loss of power. And the surest proof of the 
waning influence of the facts themselves, 
and the extent of the loss incurred by the 
transfer of their credential to authority, is 
found in the appeal, which quickly followed, 
to the secular arm. The facts, ceasing to 
be their own warrant, had to be enforced by 
the establishment of judicial relations be- 
tween Church and State. It is these inter- 
mediaries between the facts and the modern 
observer that stumble science. Its method 
is not to deal with persons however exalted, 
nor with creeds however admirable, nor 
with Churches however venerable. It will 
look at facts and at facts alone. The dan- 
gers, the weakness, the unpracticableness in 
some cases of this method, are well known. 
I Nevertheless it is a right method. It is the 
\ method of all reformation ; it was the method 
of the Reformation. The Reformation was 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 215 

largely a revolt against intermediaries, an 
appeal to facts. Now Christianity is learn- 
ing from science to go back to its facts, and 
it is going back to facts. Critics in every 
tongue are engaged upon the facts; travel- 
lers in every land are 'unveiling facts; exe- 
getes are at work upon the words, scholars 
upon the manuscripts ; sceptics, believing and 
unbelieving, are eliminating the not-facts; 
and the whole field is alive with workers. 
And the point to mark is that these men are 
not manipulating, but verifying, facts. 

There is one portion of this field of facts, 
however, which is still strangely neglected, 
and to which a scientific theology may turn 
its next attention. The evidence for Chris- 
tianity is not the Evidences. The evidence 
for Christianity is a Christian. The unit of 
physics is the atom, of biology the cell, of 
philosophy the man, of theology the Chris- 
tian. The natural man, his regeneration by 
the Holy Spirit, the spiritual man and his 
relations to the world and to God, these are 
the modern facts for a scientific theology. 
We may indeed talk with science on its own 



216 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

terms about the creation of the world, and 
the spirituality of nature, and the force be- 
hind nature, and the unseen universe; but 
our language is not less scientific, not less 
justified by fact, when we speak of the work 
of the risen Christ, and the contemporary 
activities of the Holy Ghost, and the facts of 
regeneration, and the powers which are freeing 
men from sin. There is a great experiment 
which is repeated every day, the evidence for 
which is as accessible as for any fact of 
science; its phenomena are as palpable as 
any in nature; its processes are as expli- 
cable, or as inexplicable; its purpose is as 
clear ; and yet science has never been seri- 
ously asked to reckon with it, nor has theol- 
ogy ever granted it the place its impressive 
reality commands. One aim of a scientific 
\ theology will be to study conversion, and 
restore to Christianity its most powerful wit- 
ness. When men, by mere absorption in 
the present, refuse to consider history, or 
from traditional prejudice take refuge in the 
untrustworthiness of the records, it is unwise 
to refer, in the first place at least, to phe- 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 217 

nomena which are centuries old, when we 
have the same among us now. 

But not less essential, in the scientific 
method, than the examination of facts is the 
arrangement of them under laws. And the 
work of modern science in this direction has 
resulted in its grandest achievement — the 
demonstration of the uniformity of nature. 
This doctrine must have an immediate effect 
upon the entire system of theology. For 
one thing, the contribution of the spiritual 
world to the uniformity of nature has yet to 
be made. Not that the natural world is to 
include the spiritual, but that a higher natural 
will be seen to include both. It cannot be 
said that Christianity as arranged by theology 
at present is highly natural, nor can it be 
said to be unnatural. In that relation it is 
simply neutral. The question of naturalness 
or the reverse is one w T hich has not hitherto 
at all concerned it. There was no call upon 
theology to make its presentation of itself 
with a view to nature, and therefore, if that 
is an advisable thing, or a feasible thing, it 
has yet, on the large scale at least, to be at- 



218 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

tempted. In the natural world, the truth of 
the uniformity of nature took a long time to 
grow. No one in the first instance set him- 
self to establish it. Innumerable workers in 
innumerable fields, engaged upon different 
classes of facts, found a mysterious brother- 
hood of common laws. Again and again, 
and everywhere again and again, the same 
familiar lines confronted them, few, simple, 
and unchangeable, yet each with a vanishing 
trend towards an upward point, hidden as yet 
in mystery. These workers did not formally 
consult together about these laws, or seek to 
follow them beyond the line of sight. Nor 
did they try to find a name for the hidden 
point to which all converged. But there 
grew up amongst them a sense of symmetry 
in the whole which found expression in the 
formula, which is now the postulate of 
science — the "uniformity of nature." In 
the same way, probably, shall we one day see 
disclosed the uniformity of the spiritual 
world. The earlier work had to be accom- 
plished first, the scaffolding for the inner 
temple ; but when the whole is finished there 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 219 

will be nothing in the spiritual world to put 
the mind of science to confusion. The laws 
of both as they radiate upwards will meet in a 
common cupola, and between the outer and 
the inner courts the priests of nature and the w 
priests of God will go in and out together. 

There may be laws, or actings, in the 
spiritual world, which it may seem to some 
impossible to include in such a scheme. 
God is not, in theology, a Creator merely, 
but a Father; and according to the counsel 
of His own will He may act in different 
cases in different ways. To which the reply 
is that this also is law. It is the law of the 
Father, the law of the paternal relation, the 
law of the free-will ; yet not an exceptional 
law, it is the law of all fathers of all free- 
wills. Besides, if in the private Christian life 
the child of God finds dealings which are 
not reducible to law, grant even their lawless- 
ness if that be possible, that is a family 
matter, a relation of parent and child, similar 
to the earthly relation, and scarcely the kind 
of case to be referred to science. Into ordi- 
nary family relations science rarely feels 



220 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

called to intrude ; and it is obvious that in 
dealing with this class of cases in the 
spiritual world, science is attempting a thing 
which in the natural world it leaves alone. 
If ethics chooses to take up these questions, 
it has more right to do so ; but that there 
should be a reserve in the spiritual world for 
God acting towards His children in a way 
past finding out is what would be expected 
from the mere analogies of the family. It is 
a pity this distinction between the paternal 
and the governmental relation of God is not 
more apprehended by science ; for there is 
an indelicacy about all these questions which 
arises from ignorance of it — questions con- 
cerning prayer and natural law, "special 
providences," and others — which is painful 
to devout people. It is not by any means 
that religion cannot afford to have these 
things talked of, but they are to be ap- 
proached in privacy, with the sympathy and 
respect due to family affairs. 

The relations of the spiritual man, how 
ever, are not all, or nearly all, in this de- 
partment. There are whole classes of facts 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 221 

in the outer provinces which have yet to be 
examined and arranged under appropriate 
laws. The intellectual gain to Christianity 
of such a process will be obvious. But there 
is also a practical gain to the religious ex- 
perience of not less moment. Science is 
nothing if not practical, and the scientific 
method has little for Christianity after all if 
it is not to exalt and enrich the lives of its 
followers. It is worth while, therefore, taking 
a single example of its practical value. 

The sense of lawlessness which pervades 
the spiritual world at present reacts in many 
subtle and injurious ways upon the personal 
experience of Christians. They gather the 
idea that things are managed differently 
there from anywhere else — less strictly, less 
consistently; that blessings or punishments 
are dispensed arbitrarily, and that everything 
is ordered rather by a Divine discretion than 
by a system of fixed principle. In this 
higher atmosphere ordinary sequences are 
not to be looked for — cause and effect are 
suspended or superseded. Accordingly, to 
descend to the particular, men pray for 



222 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

things which they are quite unable to re- 
ceive, or altogether unwilling to pay the price 
for. They expect effects without touching 
the preliminary causes, and causes without 
calculating the tremendous nature of the 
effects. I There is nothing more appalling] 
ItKan the wholesale way in which unthinking | 
people plead to the Almighty the richest and] 
most spiritual of His promises, and claim 
their immediate fulfilment, without them- 
- selves fulfilling one of the conditions either 
on which they are promised or can possibly 
be given, flflhe Bible is closely looked into, \ 
it will probably be found that very many of 
the promises have attached to them a condi- 
tion — itself not unfrequently the best part 
of the promise. True prayer for any promise 
is to plead for power to fulfil the condition 

Lon which it is offered, and which, being ful-l 
filled, is in that act givenj We have need, 
certainly in this sense, to know more of 
prayer and natural law. And science could 
make no truer contribution to modern 
Christianity than to enforce upon us all, as 
unweariedly as in nature, the law of causation 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 223 

in the spiritual life. 'The reason why so f 
many people get nothing from prayer is that I 
they expect effects without causes; and this 
also is the reason why they give it up. It is 
not irreligion that makes men give up prayer, 
but the uselessness of their prayers^/ 

There is one other gain to Christianity to 
be expected from the wider use of the scien- 
tific method which may be mentioned in 
passing. Besides transforming it outwardly 
and reforming it inwardly, it must attract an 
ever-increasing band of workers to theology. 
\ There is a charm in working with a true 
^method, which, once felt, becomes for ever 
irresistible.] The activity in theology at the 
present time is almost limited, and the en- 
thusiasm almost w T holly limited, to those who 
are working with the scientific method^ 
Round the islands of coral skeletons in the 
Pacific Ocean there is a belt of living coral. 
Each tiny polyp on this outermost fringe, 
and here only, secretes a solid substance from 
the invisible storehouse of the sea, and lays 
down its life in adding it to the advancing 
reef. So science and so theology grow. 



224 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

Through these workers on the fringing reef 
— behind, in contact with the great solid, 
essential, formulated past; before, the pro- 
found sea of unknown truth — through these 
workers, and through these alone can know- 
ledge grow. The phalanx of able, busy, and 
joyful spirits crowding the growing belt of 
each modern science — electricity, for ex- 
ample — may well excite the envy of theology. 
And it is the method that attracts them. 
And every day theology too, as it knows this 
method, gets busier — not undermining the 
old reef, nor abandoning it to make a new 
one, but adding the living work of living 
men to this essential, formulated past. 

We are warned sometimes that this method 
has dangers, and told not to carry it too far. 
It is then it becomes dangerous. The danger 
arises, not from the use of the scientific 
method, but from its use apart from the 
—scientific spirit. For these two are not 
quite the same. Some men use the scientific 
method, but not in the scientific spirit. And 
as science can help Christianity with the 
former, Christianity may perhaps do some- 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 225 

thing for science as regards the latter. 
Christianity is certainly wonderfully tolerant 
of all this upturning in theology, wonderfully 
generous and patient and hopeful upon the 
whole. And so just isjthe remark of " Nat- 
ural Religion," that/the true scientific spirit 
and the Christian spirit are one, that the 
Christian world is probably prepared to 
accept almost anything the most advanced 
theology brings, provided it be a joint pro- 
duct of the scientific spirit — the fearlessness 
and originality of the one, tempered by the 
modesty, caution, and reverence of the other. 
To preserve this confidence, and to keep 
this spirit pure, is a sacred duty. * There is^ 
an intellectual covetousness abroad just now 
which is neither the fruit nor the friend of a 
scientific age — a haste to be wise which, 
like the haste to be rich, leads men into 
speculation upon indifferent securities, and 
can only end in fallen fortunes. J Theology 
must not be bound up with such speculation. 
" If" — to recall one of the fine outbursts of 
Bacon — " if there be any humility towards 
the Creator, any reverence for or disposition 

15 



226 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

to magnify His works, any charity for man 
and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and neces- 
sities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred 
of darkness, any desire for the purification of 
the understanding, we must entreat men 
again and again to discard, or at least set 
apart for the while, these volatile and pre- 
posterous philosophies which have preferred 
these to hypotheses, led experience captive, 
and triumphed over the works of God ; and 
to approach with humility and veneration to 
unroll the volume of creation, to linger and 
meditate therein, and with minds washed 
clean from opinions to study it in purity and 
integrity. For this is that sound and lan- 
guage which ' went forth into all lands ' and 
did not incur the confusion of Babel; this 
should men study to be perfect in, and, be- 
coming again as little children, condescend 
to take the alphabet of it into their hands, 
and spare no pains to search and unravel the 
interpretation thereof, but pursue it stren- 
uously and persevere even unto death." 1 
The one safeguard is to use the intellectual 

1 Works, v. 132, 133. 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 227 

method in sympathetic association with the 
moral spirit. The scientific method may 
bring to light many fresh and revolutionary 
ideas ; the scientific spirit will see that they 
are not given a place as dogmas in their first 
exuberance, that they are held with caution, 
and abandoned with generosity on sufficient 
evidence. The scientific method may secure 
many new and unique possessions; the 
scientific spirit will wear its honours humbly, 
knowing that after all new truth is less the 
product of genius than the daughter of time. 
And in its splendid progress the scientific 
method will find some old lights dim, some 
cherished doctrines old-fashioned, venerable 
authorities superseded; the scientific spirit 
will be respectful to the past, checking that 
mockery at the old which those who lack it 
make unthinkingly, and remembering that 
the day will come for its work also to pass 
away. 

So much for the scientific method. Let 
us now consider for a moment one or two 
of its achievements. Apart from the usual 
reservations, which it is hoped are always 



228 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

implied — that science is only in its infancy, 
that the scientific method is almost still a 
novelty, that therefore we are not to expect 
too much nor to be absolutely sure of what 
we get — there is a special reason in this 
case for remembering that science is new. 
For this will prepare us to expect its contri- 
bution to theology — its contribution, that 
is, where the actual subject-matter of laws 
and discoveries of science are involved, its 
method — in one direction rather than in 
another, and in certain departments rather 
than in others. Itself at an elementary 
stage, we should be wrong to look for any 
very pronounced contribution as yet to the 
higher truths of religion. We should ex- 
pect the first effect among the elements of 
religion. We should expect science to be 
fairly decided in its utterances about them, 
to become more and more hesitating as it 
runs up the range of Christian doctrine, and 
gradually to lapse into silence. Proceeding 
upon this principle we should go back at once 
to Genesis. We should begin with the begin- 
nings, and expect the first serious contri- 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 229 

bution to theology on the doctrine of crea- 
tion. 

And what do we find? We find that 
upon this subject of all others science has 
most to offer us. It comes to us freighted 
with vast treasures of newly noticed facts, 
but with a theory which by many thought- 
ful minds has been accepted as the method 
of creation. And, more than this, it tells us 
candidly it has failed — and the failures of 
science are among its richest contributions 
to Christianity — it has failed to discover 
any clue to the ultimate mystery of origins, 
any clue which can compete for a moment 
with the view of theology. 

Consider first this impressive silence of 
science on the question of origins. Who 
creates, or evolves ; whether do the atoms 
come, or go ? These questions remain as 
before. Science has not found a substitute 
for God. And yet, in another sense, these 
questions are very different from before. 
Science has put them through its crucible. 
It took them from theology, and deliberately 
proclaimed that it would try to answer them. 



230 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

They are now handed back, tried, unan- 
swered, but with a new place in theology 
and a new power with science. Science has 
attained, after this ordeal, to a new respect 
for theology. If there are answers to these 
questions, and there ought to be, theology 
holds them. And theology likewise, has 
learned a new respect for science. In its 
investigations of these questions science has 
made a discovery. It has^&gen plainly that 
atheism is unscientific. (It is a remarkable 
thing that after trailing its black length for 
centuries across European thought, atheism 
should have had its doom pronounced by 
science. /With its most penetrating gaze 
science has now looked at the back of phe- 
nomena. It says " The atheist tells us there 
is nothing there. We cannot believe him. 
We cannot tell what it is, but there is cer- 
tainly something. Agnostics we may be, 
we can no longer be atheists." 

This permission to theism to go on, this 
invitation to Christianity to bring forward its 
theory to supplement science here, and give 
this something a name, is a great advance. 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 231 

And science has not left here a mere vague 
void for Christianity to fill, but a carefully 
defined niche with suggestions of the most 
striking kind as to how it is to be filled. It 
has never been sufficiently noticed how com- 
plete is the scientific account of a creative 
process, and how here biology and theology 
have actually touched. Watch a careful 
worker in science for a moment, and see how 
nearly a man by searching has found out 
God. The observer is Mr. Huxley. He 
stands looking down the tube of a powerful 
microscope. Almost touching the lens, he 
has placed a tiny speck of matter, which he 
tells us is the egg of a little water-animal, the 
common salamander or water-newt. He is 
trying to describe what he sees ; it is the 
creation or development of a life. " It is a 
minute spheroid," he says, " in which the best 
microscope will reveal nothing but a struc- 
tureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding 
granules in suspension. But strange possi- 
bilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globe. 
Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its 
watery cradle, and the plastic matter under- 



232 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

goes changes so rapid and yet so steady and 
purposelike in their succession, that one can 
only compare them to those operated by a 
skilled modeller upon a formless lump of 
clay. As with an invisible trowel the mass 
is divided and subdivided into smaller and 
smaller portions, until it is reduced to an 
aggregation of granules not too large to 
build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent 
organism. And then it is as if a delicate 
finger traced out the line to be occupied by 
the spinal column, and moulded the contour 
of the body; pinching up the head at one 
end, and the tail at the other, and fashioning 
flank and limb into due salamandrine pro- 
portions in so artistic a way, that, after 
watching the process hour by hour, one is 
almost involuntarily possessed by the notion 
that some more subtle aid to vision than an 
achromatic would show the hidden artist with 
his plan before him, strivijig with skilful 
manipulation to perfect his work" 1 So near 
has this observer come to a creator from the 
purely scientific side, that he can only de- 

li( Lay Sermons, " p. 261. The italics are ours. 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 233 

scribe what he sees in terms of creation. 
From the natural side he has come within a 
hairs-breadth of the spiritual. Science and 
theology are here simply touching each 
other. There is not room really for another 
link between. And it will be apparent, on a 
moment's reflection, that we have much 
more in this than the final completion of a 
religious doctrine. What we really have is 
the joining of the natural and spiritual worlds 
themselves. It seems such a long way, to 
some men, from the natural to the spiritual, 
that it is a relief to witness at last their 
actual contact even at a point. And this is 
also a presumption that they are in unseen 
contact all along the line ; that as we push 
all other truths to the last resort they will be 
met at the point where they disappear, that 
the complementary relations of religion and 
science will more and more be manifest ; 
and that the unity, though never the fusion, 
of the natural and the spiritual will be 
finally disclosed. 

When we turn now to the larger question 
of the creation of the world itself, we find 



234 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

much more than silence, or a permission to 
go on. We find science has a definite 
theory on that subject. It offers, in short, 
to theology a doctrine of the method of 
creation, in its hypothesis of evolution. 
I- That this doctrine is proved yet, no one will 
U assert. That in some of its forms it is 
never likely to be proved, many are con- 
vinced. It will be time for theology to be 
unanimous about it when science is unani- 
mous about it. Yet it would be idle to deny 
that in a general form it has received the 
widest assent from theology. But if science 
is satisfied, even in a general way, with its 
theory of the method of creation, " assent " 
is a cold word for theology to welcome it 
with. It is needless at this time of day to 
point out the surpassing grandeur of the 
new conception. How it has filled the 
Christian imagination and kindled to en- 
thusiasm the soberest scientific minds, is 
known to all. For that splendid hypothesis 
we cannot be too grateful to science, and 
that theology can only enrich itself which 
gives it even temporary place. There is a 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 235 

sublimity about the old doctrine of creation 

— we are speaking of its scientific aspects 

— which, if one could compare sublimities, 
is not surpassed by the new; but there is 
also a baldness. Fulfilments in this direc- 
tion were sure to come with time, and they 
have come almost before the riper mind had 
felt its need of them. The doctrine of evo- 
lution fills a gap at the very beginning of 
our religion, and no one who looks now at 
the transcendent spectacle of the world's 
past, as disclosed by science, will deny that 
it has filled it worthily. Yet, after all, its 
beauty is not the only part of its contribu- 
tion to Christianity. Scientific theology re- 
quired a new view, though it did not require 
it to come in so magnificent a form. What 
it wanted was a credible presentation, in 
view especially of astronomy, geology, and 
biology. These had made the former theory 
simply untenable. And science has sup- 
plied theology with a theory which the in- 
tellect can accept and which for the devout 
mind leaves everything more worthy of 
worship than before. 



236 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

From the contemplation of the flood of 
light poured by science over the doctrine 
ot Creation, we might pass on to mark the 
effect upon many other theological truths 
which rays from the same source are begin- 
ning to illuminate. Nothing could be more 
interesting than to trace up the doctrines 
one by one in order, and watch the light 
gradually stealing over all. This must 
always be a beautiful sight; for this is the 
light of nature, and even its dawn is lovely. 
We should like to mark where the last ray 
gilded the last hill-top, and see how many 
higher peaks lay still beyond in shadow. 
And then we should like to prophesy that 
another light will rise, when physical science 
is dim, to illuminate what remains. We do 
not mean an inspired word, but a further 
contribution from nature itself. To many 
men of science, judging by the small esteem 
in which they hold philosophy, the day of 
mental science apparently is past. To an 
enlightened theology it is the science of the 
future. It were strange indeed, and a con- 
tradiction of evolution, if the science of 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 237 

atoms and cells were a later or further 
development than the science of man. 
Theology sees the point at which physical 
science must cease to help it ; but encour- 
aged by that help, it will expect a science to 
arise to carry it through the darkness that 
remains. The analogies of biology may be 
looked to to elucidate the mysterious phe- 
nomena of regeneration. When theology 
has received its full contribution from nat- 
ural science it will be able to present to the 
world a scientific account of its greatest 
fact. The ultimate mystery of life, whether 
natural or spiritual, may still remain : but 
the laws, if not the processes, of the second 
birth will take their place in that great circle 
of the known which science is slowly re- 
deeming from the surrounding darkness. 
We shall then have an embryology, a 
morphology, and a physiology of the new 
man ; and a scientific theology will add to 
its departments a higher biology. But this 
cannot exhaust theology any more than 
biology exhausts the accounts of the natural 
man. Further contributions must come in 



238 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

from higher sciences, and different classes 
of facts must be arrayed under other laws. 
Theology, therefore, predicates a science of 
man which is yet to come. There is nothing 
external to . theology ; it must collate the 
different revelations in mind and matter, as 
science gathers them, one by one. The 
sciences are but so many natural history 
collectors, busy over all the world of nature 
and of thought in gathering material for 
the final classification by the final science. 
Without theology, the sciences are incom- 
plete, and theology can only complete itself 
by completing the sciences. 

But we have only space at present to note 
one or two other examples of the contribution 
of physical science, and these of a somewhat 
general kind. One shall be the doctrine of 
revelation itself. That science shows the 
necessity for a revelation in a new way, and 
even hints at subtle analogies for the mode 
in which it is conveyed to human minds, are 
points well worth developing. But we can 
only deal now with the more familiar ques- 
tion of subject-matter and see how that has 
been affected by evolution. 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 239 

According to science, as we have already 
seen, evolution is the method of creation, 
Now, creation is a form of revelation ; it is 
the oldest form of revelation, the most ac- 
cessible, the most universal, and still an ever- 
increasing source of theological truth. It is 
with this revelation that science begins. If 
then science, familiar with this revelation, 
and knowing it to be an evolution, were to 
be told of the existence of another revelation 
— an inspired word — it would expect that 
this other revelation would also be an evolu- 
tion. Such an anticipation might or might 
not be justified ; but from the law of the uni- 
formity of nature, there would be, to a man 
of science, a very strong presumption in 
favour of any revelation which bore this 
scientific hall-mark, which indicated, that is 
to say, that God's word had unfolded itself 
to men like His works. 

Now, if science searches the field of theol- 
ogy for an additional revelation, it will find a 
Bible awaiting it — a Bible in two forms. 
The one is the Bible as it was presented to 
our forefathers : the other is the Bible of 



240 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

modern theology. The books, the chapters, 
the verses, and the words, are the same in 
each ; yet in form they are two entirely dif- 
ferent Bibles. To science the difference is 
immediately palpable. Judging of each of 
them from its own standpoint, science per- 
ceives after a brief examination that the dis- 
tinction between them is one with which 
it has been long familiar. In point of fact, 
the one is constructed like the world accord- 
ing to the old cosmogonies, while the other 
is an evolution. The one represents revela- 
tion as having been produced on the creative 
hypothesis, the Divine-fiat hypothesis, the 
ready-made hypothesis; the other on the 
slow-growth or evolution theory. It is at once 
obvious which of them science would prefer — 
it could no more accept the first than it 
could accept the ready-made theory of the 
universe. 

Nothing could be more important than to 
assure science that the same difficulty has for 
some time been felt, and with quite equal 
keenness, by theology. The scientific method 
in its hand, scientific theology has been 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 241 

laboriously working at a reconstruction of 
biblical truth from this very view-point of 
development. And it no more pledges itself 
to-day to the interpretations of the Bible of a 
thousand years ago, than does science to the 
interpretations of nature in the time of Pyth- 
agoras. Nature is the same to-day as in the 
time of Pythagoras, and the Bible is the 
same to-day as a thousand years ago. But 
the Pythagorean interpretation of nature is 
not less objectionable to the modern mind 
than are many ancient interpretations of the 
Scriptures to the scientific theologian. 

The supreme contribution of Evolution to 
Religion is that it has given it a clearer 
Bible. One great function of science is not, 
as many seem to suppose, to make things 
difficult, but to make things plain. Science 
is the great explainer, the great expositor, 
not only of nature, but of everything it 
touches. Its function is to arrange things, 
and make them reasonable. And it has 
arranged the Bible in a new way, and made 
it as different as science has made the world. 

It is not going too far to say that there are 

16 



242 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

many things in the Bible which are hard to 
reconcile with our ideas of a just and good 
God. This is only expressing what even 
the most devout and simple minds constantly 
feel, and feel to be sorely perplexing, in 
reading especially the Old Testament. But 
these difficulties arise simply from an old- 
fashioned or unscientific view of what the 
Bible is, and are similar to the difficulties 
found in nature when interpreted either 
without the aid of science, or with the science 
of many centuries ago. We see now that 
the mind of man has been slowly developing, 
that the race has been gradually educated, 
and that revelation has been adapted from 
the first to the various and successive stages 
through which that development passed. 
Instead, therefore, of reading all our theology 
into Genesis, we see only the alphabet there. 
In the later books we see primers — first, 
second, and third : the truths stated provision- 
ally as for children, but gaining volume and 
clearness as the world gets older. Centuries 
and centuries pass, and the mind of the 
disciplined race is at last deemed ripe 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 243 

enough to receive New Testament truth, 
and the revelation culminates in the person 
of Christ. 

The moral difficulties of the Old Testa- 
ment are admittedly great. But when 
approached from the new standpoint, when 
they are seen to be rudiments spoken and 
acted in strange ways to attract and teach 
children, they vanish one by one. For 
instance, we are told that the iniquities of 
the father are to be visited upon the children 
unto the third and fourth generation. The 
impression upon the early mind undoubtedly 
must have been that this was a solemn threat 
which God would carry out in anger in 
individual cases. We now know, however, 
that this is simply the doctrine of heredity. 
A child inherits its parents' nature not as a 
special punishment, but by natural law. In 
those days that could not be explained. 
Natural law was a word unknown ; and the 
truth had to be put provisionally in a form 
that all could understand. And even many 
of the miracles may have explanations in 
fact or in principle, which, without destroy- 



244 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

ing the idea of the miraculous, may show 
the naturalness of the supernatural. 

The theory of the Bible, which makes 
belief in revelation possible to the man of 
science, Christianity owes to the scientific 
method. It is not suggested that the 
evolution theory in theology was introduced 
to satisfy the mind of the scientific thinker, 
any more than that his appreciation of it is 
the test of its truth. As regards the latter, 
it is to be weighed on its own evidence and 
judged by its fruits; and as regards the 
question of origin, its ancestry is much more 
reputable, for it was not a concession to any 
theory, but rose out of the facts themselves. 
Indeed, long before evolution was formulated 
in science, discerning minds had seen, with 
an enthusiasm which few could at that time 
share, the slow, steady, upward growth of 
theological truth to ever higher and nobler 
forms. " Wonderful it is to see with what 
effort, hesitation, suspense, interruption — 
with how many swayings to the right and 
to the left — with how many reverses, yet 
with what certainty of advance, with what 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 245 

precision in its march, and with what 
ultimate completeness, it has been evolved ; 
till the whole truth, 'self-balanced on its 
centre hung,' part answering to part, one, 
absolute, integral, indissoluble, while the 
whole lasts ! Wonderful to see how heresy 
has but thrown this idea into fresh forms, 
and drawn out from it further developments, 
with an exuberance which exceeded all 
questionings, and a harmony which baffled 
all criticism." 1 These are not the words of 
modern science. They were written forty 
years ago by John Henry Newman. Since 
then the central idea of this passage, which 
though it does not refer to the Bible is 
equally applicable to it, has been carried into 
departments of theology, in ways which were 
then undreamed of ; and however physical 
science may have contributed to this result, 
it is certain that the method is not the 
creation of science. 

Evolution is the ever-recurring theme in 
theology as in nature. We might indeed 
almost have grouped the entire contribution 

1 Newman, " University Sermons," p. 317. 



246 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

of science to Christianity around this point. 
The mere presence of the doctrine of Evolu- 
tion in science has reacted as by an electric 
induction on every surrounding circle of 
thought. Whether we like it or not, whether 
we shun the charge, or court it, or dread it, 
it has come, and we must set ourselves to 
understand it. No truth now can remain 
unaffected by evolution. We can no longer 
take out a doctrine in this century or in that, 
bottle it like a vintage, and store it in our 
creeds. We see truth now as a profound 
ocean still, but with a slow and ever-rising 
tide. Theology must reckon with this tide. 
We can store this truth in our vessels, for 
the formulation of doctrine must never, never 
stop, but the vessels, with their mouths 
open, must remain in the ocean. If we take 
them out the tide cannot rise in them, and 
we shall only have stagnant doctrines rotting 
in a dead theology. But theology, surely, 
with its great age, its eternal foundation, and 
its countless mysteries, has the least to lose 
and the most to gain from every advance of 
knowledge. And the development theory 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 247 

has done more for theology perhaps than for 
any other science. Evolution has given to 
theology some wholly new departments. It 
has raised it to a new rank among the 
sciences. It has given it a vastly more rea- 
sonable body of truth, about God and man, 
about sin and salvation. It has lent it a 
firmer base, an enlarged horizon, and a 
richer faith. But its general contribution, 
on which all these depend, is to the doctrine 
of revelation. 

What then does this mean for revelation ? 
It means in plain language that Evolution 
has given Christianity a new Bible. Its pe- 
culiarity is, that in its form, it is like the 
world in which it is found. It is a word, but 
its root is now known, and we have other 
words from the same root. Its substance is 
still the unchanged language of heaven, yet 
it is written in a familiar tongue. The new 
Bible is a book whose parts, though not of 
unequal value, are seen to be of different 
kinds of value; where the casual is distin- 
guished from the essential, the local from the 
universal, the subordinate from the primal 



248 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

end. This Bible is not a book which has 
been made; it has grown. Hence it is no 
longer a mere word-book, nor a compendium 
of doctrines, but a nursery of growing truths. 
It is not an even plane of proof text without 
proportion or emphasis, or light and shade ; 
but a revelation varied as nature, with the 
Divine in its hidden parts, in its spirit, its ten- 
dencies, its obscurities, and its omissions. Like 
nature it has successive strata, and valley and 
hilltop, and mist and atmosphere, and rivers 
w r hich are flowing still, and here and there a 
place which is desert, and fossils too, whose 
crude forms are the stepping-stones to higher 
things. It is a record of inspired deeds as 
well as of inspired words, an ascending se- 
ries of inspired facts in a matrix of human 
history. 

Now it is to be marked that this is not 
the product of any destructive movement, 
nor is this transformed book in any sense a 
mutilated Bible. All this has taken place, 
it may be, without the elimination of a book 
or the loss of an important word. It is 
simply the transformation by a method 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 249 

whose main warrant is that the book lends 
itself to it. 

It may be said, and for a time it will con- 
tinue to be said, that the Christian does not 
need a transformed Bible ; and fortunately, 
or in some cases unfortunately, this is the 
case. For years yet the old Bible will con- 
tinue to nourish the soul of the Church, 
as it has nourished it in the past; and the 
needy heart will in all time manage to feed 
itself apart from any forms. But there is a 
class, and an ever-increasing class, to whom 
the form is much. Theology is only begin- 
ning to realise how radical is the change in 
mental attitude of those who have learned 
to think from science. Intercourse with the 
ways of nature breeds a mental attitude of 
its own. It is an attitude worthy of its 
master. In this presence the student is face 
to face with what is real. He is looking 
with his own eyes at facts — at what God 
did. He finds things in nature just as its 
Maker left them; and from ceaseless con- 
tact with phenomena which will not change 
for man, and with laws which he has never 



250 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

known to swerve, he fears to trust his mind 
to anything less. Now this Bible which has 
been described, is the presentation to this 
age of men who have learned this habit. 
They have studied the facts, they have 
looked with their own eyes at what God 
did; and they are giving us a book which 
is more than the devout man's Bible, though 
it is as much as ever the devout man's Bible. 
It is the apologist's Bible. It is long since 
the apologist has had a Bible. The Bible 
of our infancy was not an apologist's Bible. 
There are things in the Old Testament cast 
in his teeth by sceptics, to which he has 
simply no answer. These are the things, 
the miserable things, the masses have laid 
hold of. They are the stock-in-trade to-day 
of the free-thought platform, and the secularist 
pamphleteer. And, surprising as it is, there 
are not a few honest seekers who are made 
timid and suspicious, not a few on the out- 
skirts of Christianity who are kept from 
coming further in, by the half-truths which 
a new exegesis, a reconsideration of the 
historic setting, and a clearer view of the 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 251 

moral purposes of God, would change from 
barriers into bulwarks of the faith. Such 
a Bible scientific theology is giving us, and 
it cannot be proclaimed to the mass of the 
people too soon. It is no more fair to raise 
and brandish objections to the Bible without 
first studying carefully what scientific theo- 
logians have to say on the subject, than it 
would be fair for one who derived his views 
of the natural world from Pythagoras to 
condemn all science. It is expected in criti- 
cisms of science that the critic's knowledge 
should at least be up to date, that he is 
attacking what science really holds ; and the 
same justice is to be awarded to the science 
of theology. When science makes its next 
attack upon theology, if indeed that shall 
ever be again, it will find an armament, 
largely furnished by itself, which has made 
the Bible as impregnable as nature. 

One question, finally, will determine the 
ultimate worth of this contribution to Chris- 
tianity. Does it help it practically ? Does 
it impoverish or enrich the soul ? Does it 
lower or exalt God ? These questions, with 



252 THE CONTRIBUTION OF 

regard to one or two of the elementary 
truths of religion have been partially answer- 
ered already. But a closing illustration from 
the highest of all will show that here also 
science is not silent. 

Science has nothing finer to offer Chris- 
tianity than the exaltation of its supreme 
conception — God. Is it too much to say 
that in a practical age like the present, when 
the idea and practice of worship tend to be 
forgotten, God should wish to reveal Himself 
afresh in ever more striking ways ? Is it too 
much to say, that at this distance from crea- 
tion, with the eye of theology resting largely 
upon the incarnation and work of the man 
Christ Jesus, the Almighty should design 
with more and more impressiveness to utter 
Himself as the Wonderful, the Counsellor, 
the Great and Mighty God ? Whether this 
be so or not, it is certain that every step of 
science discloses the attributes of the Al- 
mighty with a growing magnificence. The 
author of Natural Religion tells us that " the 
average scientific man worships just at pres- 
ent a more awful, and as it were a greater 



SCIENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 253 

Deity than the average Christian." Certain 
it is that the Christian view and the scien- 
tific view together frame a conception of the 
object of worship such as the world in its 
highest inspiration has never reached before. 
The old student of natural theology rose 
from his contemplation of design in nature 
with heightened feeling of the wisdom, good- 
ness, and power, of the Almighty. But never 
before had the attributes of eternity, and im- 
mensity, and infinity, clothed themselves with 
language so majestic in its sublimity. It is 
a language for the mind alone. Yet in the 
presence of the slow toiling of geology, mil- 
lennium after millennium, at the unfinished 
earth ; before the unthinkable past of palae- 
ontology, both but moments and lightning- 
flashes to the immenser standards of astron- 
omy : before these even the imagination 
reels and leaves an experience only for 
religion. 



Spiritual 
Diagnosis 



Essay read before the Theological 
Society, New College, Edinburgh, 
November, 1873. 



Spiritual Diagnosis 

AN ARGUMENT FOR PLACING THE STUDY 
OF THE SOUL ON A SCIENTIFIC BASIS 

THE study of the soul in health and 
disease ought to be as much an object 
of scientific study and training as the health 
and diseases of the body. 

It has long been one of the favourite 
axioms of Apologetics, that a Christian life 
is the best argument for Christianity. And, 
if an old argument, it is after all the best 
argument, for in these last days there is 
nothing in the philosophy of apologetical 
religion at all worth reviving compared with 
this living power of true lives. A free-thinker 
may go very far without meeting an argument 
to throw him back upon his own inner soul, 
but no one can live long, be he in high life 
or low life, without coming within the in- 

17 



258 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

fluence of a Christian man. The power of 
the individual, the value of the unit, the re- 
spect due to one human soul — this is the 
great truth for churches, for armies, and for 
empires. Students of the new science of soci- 
ology may deny this truth as they will, and 
their great disciple, Herbert Spencer, may de- 
nounce what he calls the " great-man-theory 
of history " as only fit for savages gossiping 
round their camp fire, but it still remains a 
great and important truth (as he himself ex- 
presses it before failing to refute it) " that 
throughout the past of the human race the 
doings of conspicuous persons have been 
the only things worthy of remembrance." 

The past has indeed no masses. Men, not 
masses, have done all that is great in history, 
in science, and in religion. The New Testa- 
ment itself is but a brief biography; and 
many pages of the Old are marked by the 
lives of men. Yet it is just this truth which 
we require to be taught again to-day — to be 
content with aiming at units. Every atom 
in the universe can act on every other atom, 
but only through the atom next it. And if 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 259 

a man would act upon every other man, he 
can do so best by acting, one at a time, upon 
those beside him. The true worker's world 
is a unit. 

Recognise the personal glory and dignity 
of the unit as an agent. Work with units, 
but, above all, work at units. 

But the capacity of acting upon individuals 
is now almost a lost art. It is hard to learn 
again. We have spoilt ourselves by thinking 
to draw thousands by public work — by what 
people call " pulpit eloquence," by platform 
speeches, and by convocations and councils, 
Christian conferences, and by books of many 
editions. We have been painting Madonnas 
and Ecce Homos and choirs of angels, like 
Raphael, and it is hard to condescend to the 
beggar boy of Murillo. Yet we must begin 
again, and begin far down. Christianity be- 
gan with one. We have forgotten the simple 
way of the Founder of the greatest influence 
the world has ever seen — how He ran away 
from cities, how He shirked mobs, how He 
lagged behind the rest at Samaria to have a 
quiet talk with one woman at a well, how He 



26o SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

stole away from crowds and entered into the 
house of one humble Syro-Phoenician woman, 
" and would have no man know it." In small 
groups of twos and threes He collected the 
early Church around Him. One by one the 
disciples were called — and there were only 
twelve in all. We all know well enough how 
to move the masses ; we know how to draw 
a crowd round us, but to attract the units — 
that is the hard matter. Teach us how to 
fascinate the unit by our glance, by our con- 
versational oratory, by our mystery of 
sympathy ! We know how to bring the 
mob about us, how to flash and storm in 
passion, how to work in the appeal at the 
right moment, how to play upon all the 
figures of rhetoric in succession and how to 
throw in a calm when no one expects, but 
every one wants it. Every one knows this, 
or can know it easily; but to draw souls one 
by one, to buttonhole them and steal from 
them the secret of their lives, to talk them 
clean out of themselves, to read them off 
like a page of print, to pervade them with 
your spiritual essence and make them trans- 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 261 

parent, this is the spiritual science which 
is so difficult to acquire and so hard to 
practise. 

" After a spirit of discernment," says an 
old French sage (La Bruyere), "the next 
rarest things in the world are diamonds and 
pearls." * Of the three elements, body, mind, 
and soul, which make up a responsible hu- 
man being, two only have been hitherto 
treated as fit subjects for scientific inquiry. 
From six thousand years of contemplation 
of the phenomena of human life and thought, 
only two sciences have emerged. Physiology 
has told us all that is possible of the human 
body ; psychology, of the mind. But the half 
is not accounted for. We wish, further, a 
spiritual psychology to tell us of the unseen 
realities of the soul. This is where our 
University training must be supplemented. 
It deals with man as a body and a mind. It 
forgets that man is a trinity. It is an extra- 
ordinary and momentous fact that by far the 
most important factor in human life has been 

1 " Apres l'esprit de discernement ce qu'il y a au monde de 
plus rare, ce sont les diamants et les perles." {Carac teres.) 



262 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

up to this time all but altogether ignored by 
the thinking world. Of course every relig- 
ious writer has a few notions upon the sub- 
ject, but notions are not enough. If the 
mind is large enough and varied enough to 
make a philosophy of mind possible, is the 
soul such a trifling part of man that it is not 
worth while seeking to frame a science of it ? 
— a science of it which men can learn, and 
which can be a guide and help in practice to 
all who feel an interest in the deepest thing 
in human life ? It is no use to say there is 
no special soul — that there is a strange 
never-comprehended essence, half emotion, 
half affection, half reason, half unearthliness, 
to attempt to analyse which would only leave 
us, like Milton's philosophic angels, " in wan- 
dering mazes lost." But this is the mere 
concealment of ignorance in mystery. There 
is a soul, and there is a spiritual life. Plato 
knew it and called it, in his wonderment over 
it, "the soulish mind." Solomon knew it 
when he talked of " the hearing ear." Addi- 
son knew it and defined it : " 'T is the divinity 
that stirs within us." And in " Culture and 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 263 

Religion " the Principal of St. Andrews Uni- 
versity charges his students " that there is a 
faculty of spiritual apprehension which is 
very different from those which are trained 
in schools and colleges, which must be edu- 
cated and fed not less but more carefully 
than our lower faculties, else it will be starved 
and die." 

The same thoughtful writer has put the 
problem which we are endeavouring to meet 
in plain and forcible terms. " But because 
the primary truths of religion," he says, 
" refuse to be caught in the grip of the log- 
ical vice — because they are transcendent, 
and only mystically apprehended, are think- 
ing men therefore either to give up these 
subjects as impossible to think about, or to 
content themselves w r ith a vague religiosity, 
an unreal sentimentalism ? " The Principal's 
question is a striking question. Are we 
content to let this great spiritual life work 
silently around us without attempting to 
know more about it, to analyse it, to make 
it more accessible to us and us to it ? Are 
we to regard it as some weird element, unap- 



264 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

proachable, mysterious, unstable, incompre- 
hensible in its essence? There is, it is true, 
an element about it which keeps us at our 
distance from it; but as its groundwork is 
human, may we not see the points where it 
touches the human, the changes it effects, 
the hindrances to the changes, and the won- 
derful complexity of action and interaction 
which it originates ? Are there materials 
here for a philosophy, and is it lawful to 
reduce it to a science ? Can there, in short, 
be a science of spirituality ? 

At first sight the idea is repulsive in the 
extreme. Yet a science is a classification of 
facts; and is there anything irreverent or 
presumptuous in attempting to classify the 
facts of the spiritual life? The facts, it may 
be answered, are too numerous; they are 
more than the sand of the sea. But so are 
the combinations of elements with which the 
chemist deals, and the modifications of mor- 
phological type with which the biologist 
deals, yet we have a chemistry and a biology. 
That, then, is the least of the difficulty. But 
a great one, apparently an insurmountable 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 265 

one, lies just on the threshold. The facts of 
physical science lie in the order of the natu- 
ral, and they are finite. The facts of spiritual 
science, if we may call it so, lie in the order 
of the supernatural, and they are infinite. 
They are pervaded by an element which no 
man can fathom. " The Spirit bloweth 
where it listeth." We look in a man's soul 
for that which we saw there yesterday, but 
the unseen influence has swept across the 
heart, and the spiritual scenery is changed. 
The man himself is the same, his passions 
unaltered in their strength, his foibles un* 
changed in their weakness, but the furniture 
of the soul has been moved, and the spiritual 
machinery goes on upon a new and sud- 
denly developed principle. Here, then, our 
investigations are stopped at the outset 
Dare we approach no nearer? Often we 
would fain do so. Often we are placed in 
such circumstances that plainly we must 
do so. A friend is in trouble, we are 
in trouble. But how are we to proceed? 
What guide have we in ministering to a 
soul diseased ? 



266 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

Is there no guide-book upon the subject, 
no chart or table of the logical history of the 
spiritual life, no chair of Spiritual Diagnosis ? 
We do not mean a table such as Doddridge 
has given us in " The Rise and Progress of 
Religion in the Soul." The fatal error of 
that style of work is to give the inquiring 
soul the idea of a certain mechanical process 
to be passed through before conversion can 
be attained. But conversion does not always 
develop like a proposition in Euclid, or sensi- 
tised plate in photography. God the Crea- 
tor will have no machine-made men in earth 
or heaven. And it is not His will that there 
should only be a few stereotyped forms of 
saints — the Richard Baxter type, the Jeremy 
Taylor type, and the Philip Doddridge type. 
Therefore it is a dangerous thing to put 
forms and processes which exist only in the 
logical imagination into the hands of the 
inquirer. But when these works are put 
into the hands of the Christian teacher or 
minister, their utility is beyond all praise. 
He, as spiritual adviser, should be thoroughly 
acquainted with the rationale of conversion. 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 267 

He should know it as a physician his phar- 
macopoeia. He should know every phase of 
the human soul, in health and disease, in 
the fulness of joy and the blackness of 
despair. He should know the " Pilgrim's 
Progress * f better than Bunyan. The scheme 
of salvation, as we are accustomed to call it, 
should be ever clearly defined in his con- 
sciousness. The lower stages, the period of 
transition, its solemnity, its despairs, its 
glimmering light, its growing faith ; and the 
Christian life begun, the laborious working- 
out in fear and trembling, the slavish scru- 
pulosity, still the fearfulness of fall, still 
remorse, more faith, more hope; and last 
of all the higher spiritual life, the realisa- 
tion of freedom, the disappearance of the 
slavish scrupulosity, the pervasion of the 
whole life with God. ^j 

Such a skeleton is easily made and easily 
remembered, and it is all that many have to 
perform their work with ; but it is no more 
adequate for its great task than is the com- 
pass of a schoolboy's whistle to take in the 
sweep of Handel's " Messiah." To fill up 



268 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

such an outline with all the exquisite tracery 
of thought and emotion and doubt, which 
develop within the mind of an inquiring 
soul, is a great and rare talent; and to 
apply such knowledge in the practice of 
daily life is a power which scarce one will 
be found to possess. Let not any think 
that such knowledge is easily attained ; nor 
have many attained it. The men to whom 
you or I would go if spiritual darkness 
spread across our souls, who are they? 
How few have penetration enough to diag- 
nose our case, to observe our least apparent 
symptoms, to get out of us what we had 
resolved not to tell them, to see through 
and through us the evil and the good. 
Plenty there are to preach to us, but who 
will interview us, and anatomise us, and 
lay us bare to God's eye and our own ? X 
won't be preached to along with Y and Z 
and Q; that won't do X any good, for he 
thinks it is all meant for K, Z, and Q. But 
to take X by himself; to feel his pulse alone, 
and give him one particular earnest word — 
the only one word that would do — all to 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 269 

himself — this is the simple feat which we 
look in vain for men to perform. There is 
a tendency piously to leave such matters to 
God, and say they are quite safe in His 
hands, who alone searcheth the heart. But 
He hath appointed us to be our brother's 
keeper, nor will He do for my brother what 
could be done by me. We cannot expect 
the Spirit's help to teach us what only 
laziness and personal indifference hinder us 
from learning; and to despise a power 
which He gave us capacities to possess is 
not the way to show that we trust Him 
who gave it. " Placeat homini quidquid 
Deo placet." 

This study of the soul, in which I am 
endeavouring to enlist your interest, is a 
difficult study. It is difficult, because the 
soul as far transcends the mind in com- 
plexity and in variety as the mind the 
body. The soul is an infinitely large sub- 
ject — an infinitely deep and mysterious sub- 
ject. The chemist in his intricate analysis 
deals not with elements more subtle and 
evasive. 



270 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

" Ay, men may wonder while they scan 
A living, thinking, feeling man." 

But we do not need to go to Mrs. Brown- 
ing, or to " Hamlet," to be told " What a 
piece of work is man ! " Apart altogether 
from the religious element in him, he is still 
the greatest mystery of science. Every man 
is a problem to every other man — much 
more every spiritual man. It is hard to 
know a man's brain, and harder to know his 
feelings ; but hardest of all to know his re- 
ligious convictions. It is hard to know the 
deepest that a man has. A well-known 
American essayist and poet has told us that 
the difficulty of analysing our neighbour's 
character arises from the fact that every 
man is in reality a threefold man. When 
two persons are in conversation, there are 
really six persons in conversation. Thus, 
to put the paradox into the shape of an 
example, suppose that John and Tom are 
in conversation, there are three Johns and 
three Toms, who are accounted for in this 
way: 



Three 
Johns 



Three 
Toms' 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 271 

1. The real John; known only to 
his Maker. 

2. John's ideal John ; John, i. e., as 
he thinks himself; never the 
real John, and often very un- 
like him. 

3. Tom's ideal John ; i. e., John as 
Tom thinks him; never the 
real John, nor Johns John, 
but often very unlike either. 

"i. The real Tom. 

Tom's ideal Tom. 
3. John's ideal Tom. 



In this way when I talk to another it is 
not me that he hears talking, but his ideal 
of me; nor do I talk to him as he defines 
himself, but to my ideal of him. Now that 
ideal will, without almost inconceivable care 
and penetration on my part, be quite differ- 
ent also from his real self as God only 
knows him, so that instead of speaking to 
his real soul, I may possibly be speaking 
to his ideal of his own soul, or more likely 
to my ideal of it. 



272 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

From this it will be seen at a glance that 
the power of soul analysis is a hard thing to 
possess oneself of. It requires intense dis- 
crimination and knowledge of human nature 
— much and deep study of human life and 
character. The man with whom you speak 
being made up of two ideals — his own and 
yours, and one real — God's, it is one of the 
hardest possible tasks to abandon your ideal 
of him and get to know the real — God's. 
Then, having known it, so far as possible to 
man, there remains the greatest difficulty of 
all — to introduce him to himself. You 
have created a new man for him, and he 
will not recognise him at first. He can see 
no resemblance to his ideal self; the new 
creature is not such a lovely picture as he 
would like to own ; the lines are harshly 
drawn, and there is little grace and no 
poetry in it. But he must be told that 
none of us are what we seem; and if he 
would deal faithfully with himself, he must 
try to see himself differently from what he 
seems. Then he must be led with much 
delicacy to make a little introspection of 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 273 

himself; and with the mirror lifted to his 
own soul you read off together some of the 
indications which are defining themselves 
vaguely upon its surface. Even in social 
and domestic circles the difficulty of per- 
forming this apparently simple operation 
upon human nature is so keenly felt that 
scarce one friend will be found with a friend- 
ship true enough to perform it to another. 
And in religious matters it will be at once 
conceded that the complexity of the difficul- 
ties increases the problem a hundredfold. 

There is a danger, however — speaking 
next of the more directly religious aspects 
of the question — in exaggerating these dif- 
ficulties; and, indeed, the further objection 
may have occurred to some minds that, by 
attaching so much importance to the human 
power, we take away the one great element 
in salvation — its Divine f reeness through 
the grace of God. 

Is not religion for the poor and illiterate ? 

is not the way easy to find ? Thank God it 

is so ! So little can man do to enlighten it. 

But he can do something, and he ought to 

18 



274 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

do more. In this more than in anything 
else he is his brothers keeper. Not for 
himself does man live. Every action of 
every man has an ancestry and a posterity 

— an ancestry and a posterity in other lives. 
" Each reads his fate in the others eyes/' 
says Emerson. " I am a part of all that I 
have met," says Tennyson. And how do you 
explain that most wonderful phenomenon, 
which is as surprising a contemplation to 
some minds as the thought of eternity itself 

— the silence of God? God keeping silence ! 
And man doubting and sinning and repent- 
ing all alone, and groping blindfold after 
truth, and losing his way and working out 
his salvation with painful trembling and fear! 
It is an unfathomable mystery; but may it 
not be, in small part, just for this that, on 
the one hand, God offers man the glory and 
honour of sharing His work; and on the 
other, that He wishes human souls to be 
graven with the marks of other human souls 
in all their free and infinite variety ? God 
is a God of variety. No two leaves are the 
same, no two sand grains, no two souls. 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 275 

And as the universe would be but a poor 
affair if every leaf were the counterpart of 
the oak leaf or the birch, so would the spirit- 
ual world present but a sorry spectacle if we 
were all duplicates of John Calvin. There- 
fore has God made room for individual ac- 
tion in the building up of His kingdom upon 
earth ; and therefore it is not a presumption 
but a duty for every man to be moulding 
and making the souls around him, to be 
perfecting and guiding his own faculties for 
this great work. 

The great danger in doing this work, next 
to doing it without any education for it, is 
to overdo it. In dealing with a case which 
is once put into our hands we are apt to con- 
sider it too much of a professional and per- 
sonal matter. Our influence has become 
too conscious. We have found what a pow- 
erful thing it may become, and we seek a 
" reputation for influence.'' Thus our pride 
is smitten if success does not at once crown 
our efforts, and we attempt to second them 
by unlawful means. We assume the didactic 
when we should simply be attractive or sug- 



276 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

gestive. We encourage the favourable and 
forget to notice an unfavourable symptom. 
We supply allopathic when prudence would 
suggest homoeopathic doses. And, finally, we 
assume too much upon ourselves, forgetting 
that we are but fellow-workers together with 
God, and by taking too officious an interest, 
the individual, making nothing of it, is apt 
to throw the responsibility of non-success 
upon us, and so spoil not only our w 7 hole in- 
fluence with others, but his own chance of 
being bettered in the future by others. 

There are also limits to the exercise of 
this power which are as yet not well defined, 
and which rest at present upon no religio- 
philosophic basis, but on mere empiricism. 
The whole subject, indeed, rests in the 
meantime only upon the merest individual 
empiricism; and it is a matter of profound 
regret that so sacred and important a sub- 
ject should exist in such a dishevelled state 
when the scientific method, which is being 
applied to so many trivial matters, could be 
so easily applied to it. We can conceive of 
some minds being deeply shocked to hear 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 277 

of scientific observations being taken on a 
human soul, and adjustments made to it, and 
results calculated as if it were a mere ques- 
tion of spectrum analysis. But the irrever- 
ence is only in the words. We do wish a 
scientific treatment of the subject; and if 
there is anything to sadden and humble in 
the contemplation of the religious work of 
the day, it is the thought of the crude and 
slipshod treatment of one of the most sacred 
subjects in the religious life. 

We are not ignoring the power of God 
in conversion by not speaking of it. You 
say He can work with the roughest tools 
even on the finest of marbles. Without 
denying it, He would not polish diamonds 
on grindstones if He could get lapidaries to 
do it better. It won't do to talk religiously, 
or complacently, or blasphemously of trusting 
in Him when we are too lazy to qualify 
ourselves for being worth the using in His 
service. Don't fear that we shall become 
too acute at diagnosing and prescribing for 
souls, and so take the matter out of God's 
hands. 



278 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

And now, in conclusion, as to the great 
subject of the training and exercise of the 
power of spiritual discernment, what is it 
possible for us to say ? We can indeed but 
guess at it. Those who have thought of it 
have confessed that everything yet remains 
to be done. Thus one of the keenest minds 
of New England has said, " The school of 
the future may be called a Life School, 
whose object is to study the strength and 
weakness of human nature minutely, . . . 
to understand men^ and to deal with them 
face to face, and heart to heart, . . . and in 
regard to such a school as this, while there 
has been much done incidentally, the revised 
procedure of education yet awaits develop- 
ment and accomplishment." Henry Ward 
Beecher, in his Yale lecture (on preaching), 
has given to this subject perhaps by far the 
most valuable popular contribution of the 
age. His chapter on the study of Human 
Nature is especially discriminating, and only 
the knowledge that there must now be few 
into whose hands that work has not fallen 
prevents us stealing time to make length- 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 279 

ened quotations. Let two suffice (page 85 
and page 94). Beecher, had he been less 
of a preacher and more of a pastor, could 
have been one of the greatest students of 
the soul. As it is, he is surpassed by few, 
perhaps by none in this country, only by 
Dr. Spencer 1 in his own. Spurgeon is not 
so much of a practical analyst as a self- 
introspectionist. So also was Thomas a 
Kempis and Blaise Pascal, and pious John 
Hervey and quaint Robert Bruce, and so 
also in a sense was Dr. Duncan and Dr. 
Goulburn, who has done for spirituality what 
Burton did for melancholy. The Puritan 
writers, and pre-eminent among them Baxter 
and Owen, were skilled analysts of human 
nature, but they seem to have applied their 
power more in the pulpit than the pew. 
In this respect, too, Bunyan was quite un- 
surpassed, and in some of his sermons, spe- 
cially his famous "last" one, the most 
masterly specimens of this kind of work 
are to be found. 

Yet with all this perfection there was 

1 Author of " Pastor's Sketches." 



280 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

always something wrong about these men 
from the practical point of view. They 
knew so much about humanity that they 
had lost what of it they had themselves in 
the pursuit of it in others. Although they 
are always called practical hands, they are 
only so in a gross sense. They were most 
of them wanting in that delicacy of handling 
which makes analysis effective instead of in- 
sulting; and many of the Puritans were 
quite destitute of the foremost quality which 
distinguishes the successful diagnosist — 
respect, veneration even, for the soul of 
another. A man may be ever so gross and 
vulgar, but when you come to deal with the 
deepest that is in him, he becomes sensitive 
and feminine. Brusqueness and an impolite 
familiarity may do very well when dealing 
with his brains, but without tenderness and 
courtesy you can only approach his heart to 
shock it. The whole of etiquette is founded 
on respect; and by far the highest and 
tenderest etiquette is the etiquette of soul 
and soul. 

To know and remember the surpassing 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 281 

dignity of the human soul — for its own 
sake, for its great God-like elements, for its 
immortality, above all for His sake who 
made it and gave Himself for it — this is the 
first axiom to be remembered. Many men 
study men, but not to sympathise with them: 
the lawyer for gain, the artist for fame, the 
actor for applause, the novelist for profes- 
sion. How well up is the actor in plot and 
passion and intrigue! how deftly can the 
novelist anatomise love and jealousy, ven- 
geance and hate ! And when there are men 
found to study human nature for its own 
sake, or for filthy lucre's sake, shall there be 
none to do it for man's sake — for Gods 
sake ? There is one great reason why the 
ministry of so many great and holy men has 
been so far from being what is called a con- 
verting ministry. We read their biographies, 
and shrink into nothingness at the contem- 
plation of such holiness and saintliness of 
life as w r e had never dreamed possible to 
man, and we marvel, and greatly, that one 
irreligious, unconverted man should be left 
in the whole countryside ; but we find indeed 



282 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

that their parish was no better than its 
neighbours. And the explanation is plain. 
Those men laboured under a terrible disease 
— it is called Theophobia — the name ex- 
plains itself. A minister catches it, and his 
power is gone. Men are awed by it, vener- 
ate it as they venerate few things else. 
They will speak of it and praise it, but never 
imitate it. It is a grand but useless spec- 
tacle. Those who have it become wrapped 
up in one subject ; and though that be the 
highest of all, it is nevertheless a monstros- 
ity when followed to the exclusion of every- 
thing else. The sympathies of these men 
are all and always Godwards. They are 
always vindicating God. Their whole at- 
mosphere is of God. They have left earth 
before their time. They have left human 
nature in the lurch ; they have forgotten 
humanity, and humanity can no longer profit 
by them, it can only wonder at them. Their 
thoughts go always straight up to God, and 
are never healthy enough to be refracted 
upon man. Now to get to God is a high 
thing, but they only get at one side of Him, 



SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 283 

They don't see over to the other side, which 
is inclined towards man. Yet to get to man 
by way of God, and God by way of man, is 
the only way to keep the entire health of the 
soul. 

We have much yet to say of this study, 
but the subject must end almost before it is 
begun. The one great thing is to study life 
earnestly and practically and realistically. 

We must aim at the manly and sturdy 
type of the religious diagnosist ; w r e must try 
to be, as Oliver Wendell Holmes forcibly 
says, " a man that knows men in the street, 
at their work, human nature in its shirt- 
sleeves — who makes bargains with deacons 
instead of talking over texts with them, and 
a man who has found out that there are 
plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints 
in the world." 

One thing I can assure you of. If any 
man develops this faculty of reading others, 
of reading them in order to profit by them, 
he will never be without practice. Men do 
not say much about these things, but the 



ff 



284 SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSIS 

amount of spiritual longing in the world at 
the present moment is absolutely incredible. 
No one can ever even faintly appreciate the 
intense spiritual unrest which seethes every- 
where around him ; but one who has tried to 
discern, who has begun by private experi- 
ment, by looking into himself, by taking 
observations upon the people near him and 
known to him, has witnessed a spectacle 
sufficient to call for the loudest and most 
emphatic action. Gentlemen, I have but 
vaguely hinted at this subject ; I venture to 
think it a question of vital interest, giving 
life a mission, giving a new and burning 
interest even to the most commonplace 
surroundings, and opening up a field for 
life-long study and effort. 






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